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Where Did It Go?

Okay, give it back! I am serious: give it back. Who stole summer? It was just Memorial Day. Now, Labor Day has come and gone. Who took summer? Who or what grabbed all those delicious days before I had a chance to enjoy every minute of them?

I know how many days a year has, 365 of them, except, of course, every fourth when we get a Leap Year. (Okay, okay, if you want to be really technical, every year has 365 and ¼ days, which is how we get Leap Year in the first place). I know every day has 24 hours. I know the verse 30 days has September, so I can make the months come out correctly. I know the whole thing adds up.

But, and here is the big but, what happened to summer? What is the scientific explanation for why those summer days go faster than all the others? What in the physics of the earth’s rotation accounts for that annual speeding up that makes summer go by in a flash while February, the least of months, drags by in 28 or 29 days of slush, sleet, and grayness punctuated by President’s Day, a time when whatever the weather, the ski slopes are packed.

What cosmic force compresses summer and elongates winter–and why is that force not compressing my wrinkles and elongating my somewhat stubby legs? Why does the force not concentrate where it could do some good?

Summer seems out of kilter from the get-go. The most sunlight of the year occurs on June 21, the very first day of the season. So, summer is all downhill from the start. June 21 is often referred to, though technically incorrect, as the longest day of the year. All days have 24 hours even though in summer, due to some unexplained astronomical quirk, they go by twice as fast. What does science have to explain that?

Speaking of science, Albert Einstein is gone, and well before I had a chance to ask him a really important question: why did he stop with E=MC2? He proved that time was the fourth dimension; he proved that light rays bent traveling through space, so why didn’t he go just a little further and explain the obvious effect of summer on time measurement? He could also have concluded, if we had just had a chance to speak, that shopping at after-Christmas sales constitutes the fifth dimension.

Summer heat makes hair frizz; it activates the ice-cream gene; it makes non-cooks fancy themselves as outdoor barbecue experts. So why didn’t Albert investigate the phenomenon just a little bit further? Maybe the rest was just too obvious: balmy weather so clearly made summer go faster; there was no need for another famous equation, or so he thought.

But as it considers the Nobel Physics Prize, perhaps the awards committee might take into account this formulation, a corollary to Einstein’s foundational equation. Summer equals ½ the same number of days in winter minus the temperature at which water freezes.

Put into the kind of punchy equation that made Einstein famous, it would look something like this: S=1/2 W minus 32.

I hope the Nobel Physics Committee takes note!