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Unlocking The Secrets of Time

Friday, February 25, 2005

Fern Time:Sacks made photo flip books to unfurl fiddleheads faster Neurologist Oliver Sacks tells us about his fascination with time. As his soon-to-be-published essay in the New Yorker will tell you, he's been fascinated by time and has used photography to get inside it since he was a little boy. We’ll hear a recording of a baby becoming a young woman, in “Nancy Grows Up.” “Nancy Grows Up” by Tony Schwartz from “Tony Schwartz Records the Sounds of Children” FW05583, provided courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. © 1970. Used by permission.

How did we get from a sundial - using the sun to tell us about the passing of time - to standarized time?

Radio Lab takes a spin through the history of time, making a stop at the way the railroads changed our experience of time and Rebecca Solnit, author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West joins us to describe how a photographs stopped time to create a horse floating in the air.

Plus Jay Griffiths, author of A Sideways Look at Time, introduces us to the variety of clocks- spice clocks, flower clocks, potato clocks- that predated the wristwatch.

More on Muybridge's Horses on the Getty Museum website
Read Oliver Sacks' books
Jay Griffiths' book, A Sideways Look At Time
Rebecca Solnit's book, River Of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

  • "Mental State"   Quiet American - Experiments
  • "Junior Ragtime "   Raffi - More Singable Songs - (c) 1977 Homeland Publishing (SOCAN). A division of Troubadour Music Inc.All rights reserved. Used by permission.
  • "Stepping Out of My Dream"   Flanger - Midnight Sound - Ntone

Comments

  • [1] bjkeefe from Rochester, NY, USA May 27, 2007 - 04:12PM

    Just a bit of housekeeping: the link posted for Oliver Sacks's web site, which points to a page lower down in his site, is broken. However, the top level link still works:

    http://www.oliversacks.com/

    I'd rave about how good this episode was, and how great RadioLab is in general, but you'd just get swelled heads. And, being public radio, you'd probably also respond by asking me for money.

    Okay, I'll admit it. My new favorite NPR show, RadioLabs, along with my old favorite NPR show, On The Media (whence I came to this site), are conspiring to make me think I should start giving again.

    Keep up the superb work.


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