Serious Units Fables: a serious minute is a thousand snickers

Part 8 — The Flock of Moons

When the moon is full imagine kneading it like dough. When you have kneaded it to uniform consistency, divide it into many different-sized pieces and roll them between your palms to make them round. On each of them it would take the same length of time for a skimming orbiter to travel the length of the radius across the surface — they all have the same skimtime. Another way of describing the skimtime is as the low-orbit radian arctime. For earth, which is denser than the moon, it's about a quarter of an hour. It's moderately amazing that regardless of their differences in size, as long as planets have the same density they have the same skimtime. Less dense planets have longer skimtimes.

Put them out in a flock, where the solitary moon used to be. Give each a little spin as you put it out so that they all turn some ten percent faster than the earth. That will make their days a little faster and their minutes ten percent shorter than conventional ones on earth. Each of their minutes will be a natural minute, or what one might call a serious minute. On each moon the skimtime will be between nineteen and twenty minutes, for simplicity call it twenty. You are slightly down-sun of the flock so that they all look like little crescents of various sizes. You are seeing mostly their nightsides, with only a thin edge of dayside. A cluster of different-sized crescent moons.

Because people living in this flock of moons all share the natural minute as their unit of time, their idea of light's standard speed is ten million miles a minute. Since a minute is a bit unwieldy for some things, they also have shorter unit of time: a thousandth of a minute called a snicker. In conventional Earth terms, their serious minute is 54 ordinary seconds, so a snicker is 0.054 second. Snicker is a good name for it because it is roughly a twentieth of a second and thus as long as one snort of a snicker. In the language of this flock of moons, light's speed is ten thousand miles per snicker. When it is day on one of these moons, a square pace patch of area facing the sun receives 10²¹ quanta of sunlight per snicker, or 10²⁴ per minute.

These people believe that the brief snicker interval is suitable for describing a note in music. In conventional violin tuning the D string frequency is about 100 per snicker, or 10⁵ per minute. There is some variation but this is certainly in the normal range. This note is also middle D on the piano. If you care about the distinction between angular and cyclic format, their frequencies are in angular format.

The universe has a built-in frequency which we will talk about in the next chapter. It is a definite frequency and just happens to be an exact power-of-ten factor higher than the ordinary D-string tuning just mentioned—universe frequency is higher than the frequency of a conventional violin's D string (or middle D on the piano) by a factor of 10⁴⁰. In the language of the moons, that makes the core frequency of the universe 10⁴⁵ per minute.

The sun is beyond and to the left of the swarm so the crescents all look like the letter "C" — open to the right. You put up your left hand to shade your eyes from the sun so you can get a better look. Each of the planets has some kind of beacon on its dark side. A bonfire? A fireworks-display? Now you remember: they are celebrating the annual festival, their planet's birthday. These are holiday lights.