The King

In ancient times/ to have order/ you had to have a King.

The King brings order to the unruly kingdom.

But what is a king?  Its merely a role in a system of meaning.  There is nothing about the physical properties of a person that necessarily makes them fit to be king.  There have been tall kings and small kings and fat kings and skinny kings.  To be king/ you just have to be coronated by the right crowd.

The world still has a King.  He is called the second.

He is defined as follows:

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

The King is an arbitrary physical process.  But there is something special about the King: the subjects of the realm are forbidden from measuring how long this physical process takes.  We can measure every other physical process in the world/ but not our King.  Further/ if we want to measure any other physical process in the world/ we have to use the King (or one of his governors) to measure it.

With respect to all the other physical processes in the world/ we can construct testable hypotheses and theories relating to those physical systems.  We can't construct a testable hypothesis about our King.  He exists by definition: he is exactly one second.  He cannot be measured.  He exists outside the scientific description of nature.  But without our King/ there would be no kingdom/ no order in the world.

The King is the physical picture of Time.  He is an Icon.  The Word made Flesh.

Without the King/ we could not measure the temporal extension of physical processes.  Without the King/ we couldn't translate between a physical world and our mathematical symbolism.  Through him/ all empirically measurable things can be translated into a mathematical representation in time.

Don't worry.  Some day he will be deposed.  But then we will get a new King.