Every now and then something in the Cosmos slips and reveals that the universe is not as neatly ordered a system as we like to believe.
Consider this: I wake up every morning at 5 AM. Sometimes I’d like to sleep longer but our cocker spaniel has adapted to my pattern and cries to be let out of the room. Every morning. 5 AM. Like clockwork.
The dog does not get out of her basket before 5 AM. If I get up at 3:30 to tour the perimeter, the dog stays in her basket.
This morning the dog gets up and starts her snorting, crying, and pawing at the door. I check Maureen’s alarm clock: 5 AM. I get up and let the dog out. Since I had set the alarm on my phone to go off at 5:30, I crawl back into bed to get a few more winks.Â
I fall in and out of slumberland for half an hour. I peek at the clock on Maureen’s nightstand and see that it is now 5:34 AM. Why didn’t my phone alarm go off? I look at my phone and see that the time is 3:38 AM.
This is strange. The phone gets the time from a network server. I get up and check my computer in the next room. And my wrist watch on the desk. All agree that it is 3:38 AM.
I go back to bed and lay half awake wondering why Maureen’s clock is two hours fast. Couldn’t have been a power failure. Perhaps she accidently changed the time setting when she set the alarm.
Then another thought came to me. What made the dog think that it was 5 AM?