Re: Clockwise without clocks

--- 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