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Unlocking The Secrets of Time
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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
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I loved this episode on time. It's one of my favorite subjects from "speculative" physics. There was only one small error, most likely a reflection of how two excellent reporters chose to express themselves. In fact, in their reports they always referred to the passage of time, but they meant two different things. First, is the objective speed with which things occur--time itself. Second, is the perception of the passage of time, which is somehow subjective and hard-wired into our brains. Einstein demonstrated the former purely mathematically when he showed that the variable for time must change (time dilation) as objects speed up relative to one another. This was curiously only "confirmed" years later when technology permitted experiments of this nature. The latter is a feature that many of us have experienced, when under some stressful situation events seem to occur in slow motion. They don't, in fact, occur in slow motion, however, somehow some part of our brain is suddenly engaged and we are able to process time faster which results in the perception that time is moving slower. Too bad it doesn't.
Will this be available for download anytime soon?
I was wondering about what Mark G said in his comment, "somehow some part of our brain is engaged and we process time faster, which results in time moving slower". Is there any point where the objective reality, 'outside the mind', and subjective 'within the mind' meet and act as a part of one unified motion of time? If we view the brain as having a quantifable existence, as having an objective reality, then where do we draw the line with subjective experience? If the brain is a physical entity and it functions more rapidly under stress would that constitute not a subjective shift but an objective shift in time? When in the moment the physical firings of neurons translates into conscious thought what is lost, gained, or transformed which would cause for the label of subjective to appear? Does the term subjective have an objective existence?
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