May 28, 2006

Time Perception

I had planned to blog this BBC radio broadcast on time perception a few days ago but happened to be particularly busy that week. The show focuses primarily on biological and physiological causes for experiences of time dilation, the perception that time is slowing down, during car accidents or other life-threatening situations. It's worth a listen while you drink your morning (or early afternoon) coffee. Seen at The Salt Box among other places.

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April 22, 2006

Time is on Our Side

Via Jason J: A link to the International Society for the Study of Time. Given my current book project, I should really know more about these folks.

Update: Speaking of time, Boing Boing points to some "upcoming numerically cool dates."

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January 15, 2006

Inventing Eternal Sunshine

Interesting news: researchers have developed a pill that may make it possible to blunt memories of traumatic experiences, such as those associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The researchers, a group of psychiatrists based in the US and Canada, have postulated that PTSD occurs "because the brain goes haywire during and right after a strongly emotional event, pouring out stress hormones that help store these memories in a different way than normal ones are preserved." These resrachers believe that taking a pill to diminish these chemicals soon after the traumatic event might prevent PTSD. A quick scan of the article does clarify that the pill will not, a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, cause amnesia or put a "hole" in someone's memory.

There are some obvious benefits here, as well as some objections that are also not surprising: people who are dealing with all manner of traumatic experiences--whether abuse, war trauma, or a catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina--might be able to ease some of their pain, and the article notes that with veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, doctors need better treatment for PTSD (no mention of the needs of civilians living in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course). As Leon Kass, Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics notes, "painful memories serve a purpose and are part of the human experience."

One of the reasons I find this story compelling is the theory of memory that informs the research. The AP writer notes, "Memories, painful or sweet, don't form instantly after an event but congeal over time. Like slowly hardening cement, there is a window of opportunity when they are shapable." I've got some other writing/research to do tonight, so I can't work through this story in as much detail as I would like, but found it too intriguing not to mention on the blog (and hope that blogging it will help me to remember to return to the idea later).

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January 2, 2006

One in a Million Trillion

This is primarily a bookmarking post for future reference. I've been watching DVD collections of the Errol Morris series, First Person, over the last few days and found the episode, "One in a Million Trillion: An Interview with Rick Rosner," particularly interesting. In the episode, Rosner describes how he sought to repeat the experience of going to high school several times until he could "get it right." Rosner managed to forge transcripts, identification cards, and other materials and would then "transfer" into a new high school in a different state. Essentially he engages in a series of "do-overs" he compares to time travel (or at least the repetitions of an alternate-reality film such as Groundhog Day).

This desire for a do-over colors Rosner's adult life, as well. Rosner describes his obsessive attempts to get onto the show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Once on the show, Rosner loses on what he believes to be a poorly-worded question ("What capital city is located at the highest altitude above sea level? A. Mexico City, B. Quito, C. Bogotá, D. Kathmandu"), eventually spending the next several years of life seeking to get another chance on the show to make up for the faulty question (Rosner's correspondence to Millionaire producers is available here).

Over the course of his research, Rosner develops, according to Errol Morris's website, "a theory of cosmology in which the universe is seen as trillions of years old. 'Why so old!?' you might ask: To give the universe the opportunity to endlessly redo itself" (side note: these reviews offer a slightly different take on Rosner's experiences).

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October 10, 2005

Night and Day

For now a bookmarking post: Peter Baldwin, "Mapping Time: Night and day in the nineteenth-century city," Commonplace, 6.1 (October 2005). Thanks to Anne for the link.

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August 2, 2005

The End of Time

Via McChris: a WSJ.com article about a US proposal to the United Nations to "simplify the world's timekeeping by making each day last exactly 24 hours." essentially, the US wants to eliminate "leap seconds," which are added every few years because the earth takes slightly longer than 24 hours to fully rotate. As the article notes, adding leap seconds can often be a big hassle for computers that were not programmed to accept 61-second minutes, and because some computer programmers assert that such imprecision can be costly, the leap second may become a thing of the past.

This change would, of course, also have its costs. Sundials and sextants would no gradually lose their accuracy, although with GPS, that concern has generally been dismissed. It would also lead to teh sun rising later and later, a problem the US argues could be avoided by adding a "leap hour" every 500 years or so. Others, including the Earth Rotation Service's leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory, are concerned about removing time's representation from its ground in the earth's rotation: "As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth." His comments are echoed by astronomer Steve Allen, who comments, "Time has basically always really meant what you measure when you put a stick in the ground and look at its shadow." Gambis's concern also has financial implications. Re-setting telescopes to the new time would cost thousands of dollars each. And, of course, the sun would set on the role of Britain's Royal Observatory in establishing universal time, poetntially setting off a plot that only Joseph Conrad could have imagined (thanks for the Conrad tip, McChris).

The WSJ article is right that the question is essentially a philosophical one, or perhaps more precisely, a representational one, raising questions about what, exactly, time represents, and in some sense, the removal of the leap second might seem to represent an increased abstraction of time, moving it away from the "natural" rotation of the earth. Of course, even universal time (Greenwich Mean Time, now relaced by Coordinated Universal Time, measured by atomic clocks) is a relatively recent phenomenon, as Stephen Kern explains in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (has anyone read Kern's new preface?), one largely connected to increasing industrialization and faster transportation in Eurpoe and the US.

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May 3, 2005

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Two time-travel related stories have been making the rounds in the blogosphere this week. First, as Diana mentioned in a comment to a previous entry, Amal Dorai, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering is planning a Time Travel Convention for May 7 at 8 PM. Following the logic of the Cat and Girl comic, Dorai reasons that you would really only need one time-travel convention because time travelers could theoretically return to their home times and invite all of their friends, though Destination Day may give the MIT time-travel convention some competition (also check out the NPR interview with Dorai and his short bibliography on time travel).

Meanwhile, RedNova reports on a Black Box that has had some success in anticipating catastrophic events. According to scientists, including Princeton University emeritus researcher Dr. Roger Nelson, this black box anticipated the September 11 attacks by several hours and later repeated this uncanny sensitivity by anticipating the tsunami in December of last year. These researchers, who are part of the Global Consciousness Project, claim that the black box consistently experiences abnormal activity (I'm not going to try to re-explain the details) immediately before major global events. They theorize that if time flows backwards and forwards, "it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future." The scientists clearly don't anticipate that they'll be able to produce a machine that can predict the future with any degree of certainty, though some hope that such a machine might allow people to tap into their psychic abilities.

Because I'm writing on time-travel film, I always find these stories fascinating even if I'm not sure (yet) how they'll fit into the work that I'm doing (if they fit at all). I think that what I find so interesting about Durai's Time-Travel Convention is his awareness that the Web may not exist in its current form in the distant future when time travel is invented (assuming that it ever is), hence his attempts to have the event mentioned in print media with notices in major newspapers and tucked into "obscure" books (does my dissertation count?).

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January 8, 2005

Time Travel and Philosophy

Just a quick link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on time machines (via Jonathan Goodwin).

By the way, I saw Hotel Rwanda last night and highly recommend it. I'll write a longer review later tonight, perhpas, when I've actually managed to get some work done.

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October 6, 2004

Self-Indulgent Link Storage

Working on revising the abstract for my book project and so I was digging around in my archives (procrastination? organizing my thoughts? you decide!), and I rediscovered this Crooked Timber entry by Brian Weatherson on time travel. While sifting through the comments (now, I'll admit that's procrastination), I found a link to M. Joseph Young's "A Primer on Time." I haven't looked very closely at Young's site yet, but his analyses on several prominent time travel movies should be helpful, if only to remind me about some films I need to revisit.

I keep forgetting to rewatch the underrated Marisa Tomei-Vincent D'Onofrio film, Happy Accidents,, for example, but then again, I really didn't need to be reminded about the Meg Ryan vehicle, Kate and Leopold (actually K&L is a little more interesting than it looks). I'm also trying to think about ways of incorporating a chapter or so on television. I'd especially like to write about the original versions of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

What I enjoyed the most about Brian's entry and the comments that followed was the discussion of causality, a topic that I have tended to discuss less often in my work on time travel films. I'm usually less concerned about the specifics about the logic of time travel, and in fact, I'm more interested in those films that are "incoherent" or "inconsistent" to use a couple of terms that came up often in the CT discussion. I realize that I'm being pretty cryptic here, mostly because I'm trying to re-process some ideas that are in need of revision.

Update: Just a quick reminder that one of my conference narratives has a link to and discussion of the DeMille film, Male and Female, which I want to discuss in my early cinema chapter.

Update 2: Another DeMille film that deals with time issues, the reincarnation film, The Road to Yesterday, which is not available on VHS or DVD from Amazon. For some reason, on second glance, Man and Woman doesn't look like the right film.

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January 3, 2004

Zombies and Time Travel

I came across Matthew Yglesias' discussion of zombies and time travel while blog surfing. It sounds like a cool philosophical problem, but I'm not sure I have much to say about it right now. I just wanted to remember where I found it (See also Brian Weatherson).

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January 1, 2004

Questions of Time, New Year 2004

The beginning of a new year invariably leads to meditations on the human understanding of time, and this year is no exception. An interesting piece in today's New York Times by Brian Greene focuses on some of the big questions we have about time.

Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia (and author of The Elegant Universe and the forthcoming The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality), emphasizes the power that conventional representations of time have over everyday experience--notably the fact that every year millions (if not billions) of people gather at public places, religious rituals, or private parties (I had a good time at the party I attended, by the way) to mark the beginning of a new year.

He then discusses the radical changes in our understanding of time over the last century, specifically the changes created by relativity and quantum mechanics and suggests that scientists' views of time will likely undergo a radical change in the coming years:

Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.
I'm still trying to grasp exactly how these changes will be articulated, but Greene's discussion of the tendency to compartmentalize time--to separate scientific and subjective representations of time--is quite interesting.

I do have a few other observations that I'd like to work through, perhaps in ways that inform my book project:


(By the way, there's a rumor floating that bloggers can create permanent links to Times articles without having to pay for access. Any suggestions or information would be welcome.)

Update: Thanks to Jason J and Invisible Adjunct, here is the New York Times link generator.

Jason also links to The Weather Project at the Tate Museum, which reminds me to think about the connections between representations of time and weather (but I'll put that project on hold for now).

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September 30, 2003

Could we ever be Time Lords?

Via Crooked Timber, a link to an article in The Age on the physics of time travel. Most interesting for my purposes are the references to the Gwyneth Paltrow film, Sliding Doors, as an illustration of the "many universes" hypothesis, and to Stephen Hawking's "Chronology Protection Conjecture," which, according to Leo Brewin, basically implies that time travel paradoxes won't happen because we can't make sense of them.

Game Update: Alas, it looks like I bragged about my the Braves a little too quickly. They've come back a little (it's 4-2 as I write), but they are almost out of chances. Maybe I could build a time machine and get the Cubs' bus lost in Atlanta traffic....

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August 5, 2003

New Theory of Time?

Via Blogdex: I'm generally skeptical of any theory that offers itself as "ground-breaking," but Peter Lynds' "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity," soon to be published in Foundations of Physics Letters is apparently making waves, specifically for the Lynds' apparent resolution of two of the most famous of Zeno's Paradoxes.

The most famous involves an arrow being fired toward a target. Zeno argued that the arrow should never reach its destination because before it does, it has to travel half the distance to the target, when it again must travel half that distance, and so on. Lyndes' solution to the paradox is that motion cannot be derived from freezing objects in a single instant:

According to both ancient and present day physics, objects in motion have determined relative positions. Indeed, the physics of motion from Zeno to Newton and through to today take this assumption as given. Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. "There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."
I may be misreading Lyndes' argument slightly, but it sounds similar to Bergson's critique of Zeno--and by extension--the cinema for attempting to re-create movement from static instants. Zeno's paradox transforms the movement of the arrow into its trajectory, the line that it follows through its course, which as Doane points out in her discussion of Bergson's critique of Zeno, is infinitely divisible. In short, "movement cannot be reconstituted from immobilities" (174).

Lynds does extend this logic to suggest that there is no necessary progression of time, that time is essentially directionless, which is a much different conclusion than the one Bergson (who is highly invested in duration) makes, but I'm not sure this is an entirely new position either. I'm just not ready to tackle it right now.

The article touting Lynds' discoveries has the language of a press release, which only adds to my incredulity, and part of the "fantasy" embedded in the tone of the article emphasizes Lynds' status as an "untutored" genius, the next Einstein, whose ideas were not acceptable within the mainstream academic and scientific establishments. A copy of Lyndes' paper, "Zeno's Paradoxes: A Timely Solution," is available online in PDF format.

I realize I'm coming across as a little harsh here, and I don't mean to be. I still feel more like a dabbler when it comes to theories of time, and my main interest in cinematic constructions of time focuses more on the ideological implications of these temporalities. In fact, I'm not sure that I disagree with Lynds' reading of Zeno; I'm just not sure these ideas are entirely new (lively discussion available at Slashdot).

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