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Re: Clockwise without clocks

From:Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 20:42
--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Geoff Horswood <geoffhorswood@H...> wrote:
> So how would you express the ideas of "clockwise" and
"anticlockwise" in a
> culture that doesn't have clocks?
The mathematical way to describe those is "lefthanded" and "righthanded". If you look straight onto the outstretched thumb of your right hand, the fingers curl around it counter-clockwise, and vice versa for the left hand. The direction of the axis is important, since any clockwise rotation looks anticlockwise when viewed from the other side. For example, the rotation of Earth is right-handed wrt the North direction. This holds true regardless of whence you look at it. As an other example, the measured spin of any fermion along its direction of movement is biased towards left-handed. The bias becomes total when the movement reaches lightspeed. The standard model of particle physics considers neutrinos to travel at light speed, thus they ALWAYS spin left-handedly. Meanwhile, the resolution of the solar neutrino problem leads us to believe that neutrinos do have a rest mass, albeit incredibly tiny, such that they must move slower than lightspeed (albeit incredibly little so -- the neutrinos created by a supernova, only hours before the light burst, still reach us ahead of the light, although the two signals race for many thousand years to reach us). Is is therefore possible, if entirely improbable, to measure a right-handed spin from a neutrino. Antifermions, BTW, are biased towards right-handed spin. -- Christian Thalmann