Who Should Pay the Reparations?

    We are still living with the repercussions of past events, and who are the people paying for the reparations they have cause? I'll tell you who isn't paying, the people that caused them. From the article Caney focused on the historical issue of anthropogenic climate change, but some of that ideology can be used when discussing other historical issues, like slavery. Both issues have caused a damaging affect on society, and frankly have caused irreversible damage. 

    Climate change has been happening for over a century. Whether pollution is caused by a factory, hazardous waste, or even just a standard automobile. Each one of these has contributed to the damaging effects of climate change. Unfortunately the majority of the damage has been caused by people that are no longer here, so now who pays for the reparations? Just like the majority of the people who used to keep slaves are no longer living, so how can they pay for their reparations? Something is wrong with society, when we were a kid it was drilled into our brains that we pay for our mistake, but no one is paying for the damaging mistakes that they have cause-actually the people that are paying for the effect of climate change are those of future generations.  

    It just doesn't make any sense, the people who had slaves, at least to the best of my knowledge, never paid for their wrongdoings. The people that paid for them were the slaves themselves, having to live with that horrible quality of life. Once slavery was abolished it's not like their lives got much easier, I mean we can still see racial injustice today. Overall, someone needs to pay for these mistakes, Caney has spelled out the causation for climate change, and we know the causation for slavery. The ultimate question is, how do we move forward? Caney mentioned the casual account and the beneficiary account, but both in my opinion don't work. Taking the causal account route would mean that the people who caused the damage would pay, which theoretically sounds good but most of those people are no longer here. When we look at the Beneficiary account would mean putting the reparations on someone associate with that individual which I don't think is fair. If they weren't part of the reasoning to cause the harm in the first place then why should the be paying? I think both of these accounts mean well but I just don't think this is how justice should be served, and frankly I don't see a better option at this time either. 

Can Time Be Defined?

 After constantly rereading this article, I would have to say that I am still a bit confused on the notion of time and how it is defined. With that being said, it is clear that a second is defined as a fixed unit, with taking into account frequencies as well as electromagnetic radiation. As the articles states, most individual's agree that the caesium transition is used to define a second, but another ideology that was brought up in the article is that keeping specifications the same, all caesiun atoms have the same frequency. After redefining the second from the solar day, now "the second has been defined as the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133 in the ground state". Although from my understanding this really is only stable/equal depending on the position of the atom, and from what I gather, if it is not always stable how can this be an accurate depiction? Along with that I learned that clocks measure these frequencies that involve caesium/atomic transitions. For example, there are a number of atomic clocks world wide which measure frequencies like the ones measuring atoms. Because these clocks have to be at a specific setup there is, although small, room for error. Which is why is it important that we look at hundreds of clocks around the world to get the most accurate measurement of time. By taking the weighted average of the different clocks is how they're able to get such a precise measurement.    

    Something I have always wondered was what did people use before the invention of the clock? During my research, something that I found interesting was that depending on where you were in the world, each standard of time was unique. Some examples were the decimal time system, which invented the ephemeris second. Shortly after came the invention of an atomic clock which ultimately stated that every year we lose approximately .6 of a second of time. Which personally I don't quite understand this ideology but I find it fascinating all of these different measurements before there was a universal definition of time.  

-Lauryn 

Physics to Explain Time

 Despite the article we read last week, my questions regarding if time exists, or not, were still unclear. I am a person who likes factual evidence to back up any claims, so the articles we read this week really transformed my previous conclusions. I understood relativity of simultaneity as basically it depending on you perspective to help determine time. For example, they mentioned how when you're standing at the midpoint of a surface, the flashes occurred at the same time, but that was only in your perspective. To a person who is in motion would say the opposite, that one came before the other. So my take on all of this initially, was that it is hard to comprehend two events happening at the same time, but also them not occurring simultaneously. After I finally started to grasp how that was possible my conclusion regarding time is that it does in fact exists, despite other things I have read from McTaggart. I believe that the Einstein article's were showing that we'll each see different "events" depending on our frame of reference. 

What simultaneity is not, is referring to it based on appearances, meaning that you would need to actually take that into affect when coming to your conclusion. The article used the example of a person seeing a lightning strike and then hearing thunder, their conclusion was that it happened at the same time. Although the observe who was of greater distance away from where the strike happened, claimed one happened before the other. This example I am still a bit confused on, so I am interested to see how you interpreted that. Nonetheless, I believe that time does in-fact exists, although it will be different for-everyone depending on you frame of reference. 

-Lauryn