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civil commitment

(Encyclopedia)civil commitment or involuntary commitment, process by which a court determines whether or not to order an individual to receive treatment or care or be confined. A person may be committed after a hea...

ephemeris time

(Encyclopedia)ephemeris time (ET), astronomical time defined by the orbital motions of the earth, moon, and planets. The earth does not rotate with uniform speed, so the solar day is an imprecise unit of time. Ephe...

space-time

(Encyclopedia)space-time, central concept in the theory of relativity that replaces the earlier concepts of space and time as separate absolute entities. In relativity one cannot uniquely distinguish space and time...

daylight saving time

(Encyclopedia)daylight saving time (DST), time observed when clocks and other timepieces are set ahead so that the sun will rise and set later in the day as measured by civil time. The amount of daylight on a given...

sidereal time

(Encyclopedia)sidereal time (ST), time measured relative to the fixed stars; thus, the sidereal day is the period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis so that some chosen star appears twice on ...

civil engineering

(Encyclopedia)civil engineering: see engineering. ...

civil liberty

(Encyclopedia)civil liberty: see liberty.

Code Civil

(Encyclopedia)Code Civil: see Code Napoléon.

time zone

(Encyclopedia)time zone: see standard time.

time-division

(Encyclopedia)time-division: see multiplexing. ...