Radiolab - Time

Episode Date: May 29, 2007

Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." And it’s still as close a definition as we have. This hour of Radiolab, we try our hand at unlocking the mysteries of time. We stretch and bend it, wrestle with its subjective nature, and wrap our minds around strategies to standardize it...stopping along the way at a 19th-century railroad station in Ohio, a track meet, and a Beethoven concert.

Listener supported WNYC Studios You're listening to Radio Lab On New York Public Radio Radio. Public Radio, WNYC. You know this music. Trust me, you've heard it your entire life. The reason you can't recognize it now is because the composer, born in 1770,

intended for this moment, the one you're hearing. to last two seconds. Like that. However, had he been a whale, Beethoven might have written his ninth symphony this way. Changes that for us would take an instant, would transpire over minutes, and a movement might last six hours.

That's in fact what this is. Beethoven's ninth symphony digitally stretched from its normal 60-some-odd minutes to last an entire day, 24 hours. And if you sit for it, the entire 24-hour duration of the piece, as people do from time to time, you realize that this music is not simply slower. The slowness unlocks something in the original. Maybe it was there all long and we couldn't hear it. We play with the meter. The music is mostly about meter,

after all, and the music has a different story to tell, a secret, perhaps. Locked up inside the routine, changed the routine. You make new discoveries. That's what we're going to. That's what We'll do this hour. We'll look at time so closely. We'll discover new things about it. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. My guest tonight for the next hour to help me wrestle with time is the science correspondent Robert Crowicz of ABC News, Nova and Nightline. How are you, sir? I'm very well. I like this bathing and Beethoven thing you've got going on here. It's cool, right? Yeah. Actually, at the end of the program, we will be dropping in on a performance that happened recently in San Francisco, where people listen to it over the course of an entire day. A day? A day. So, we're first. Let's begin with a guy who I think you'll find, well, he thinks very deeply about time.

In fact, in a very gentle kind of way, you could say he's time obsessed. You've heard of the neurologist Oliver Sacks? Sure, the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Yeah, right. And awakenings. So I was over at his house. This is me actually over at his house right now. Keep turning.

And he told me this story. I don't know where this is relevant. I had an odd experience some years ago. In fact, in 1993, when I got a message from my publisher, which they had sent out to various of their authors, for their 21st birthday, their jubilee, asking if we would like to select a year from the previous 21 years and write about it.

When I got this message, I thought, well, why don't I choose 1972, which was the first of the years? And it's a year which is very vivid and important for me, partly because it was the year in which my mother died, partly it was the year in which I completed awakenings, and these two events were coupled in some ways. I was actually in the car when I got this message. I picked it up on a car phone, and I was driving up to Canada, and I had a tape recorder with me, so I spoke 1972 aloud, and by that time, I thought, well, why stop? why don't I do

1973 as well? How long did 72 take? Did you get to Montreal? No, 72 probably took about half an hour. By the time I got to the Canadian border, I was up to 1987, and I did in fact make an extra loop so that I could complete things.

However, it turned out that the most recent years, in the late 80s and the 90s, I did not apparently have such detailed memories of and they seem subjectively shorter. So time, I guess we all know this, is a very plastic thing.

It's swollen and rich some of the time and then it's like flaccid and e-h, other times. But because Oliver is so inquisitive, such an investigator at heart, all his life, he's looked inside things. And beginning when he was 10, 11, 12, he wanted to get inside time. I had lots of boyish interests and these pre-adolescent interests.

They all took a beating when I became an adolescent. But one of them was chemicals and I had a chemistry laboratory. One of them was photography and I had dark room and cameras. And one of them was plants. And in particular, my mother was very fond of ferns and the garden was full of ferns. I love the way in which the curle. up fiddleheads or crozi as of ferns would unfurl and it was almost as if time was sort of rolled up inside them as if time itself unfurled but one couldn't actually see this they would

perhaps take a day or two to do this and I wanted to see it it made me think of these Christmas things one would blow and these paper trumpets which would unfold and so I set up my camera on a tripod and at least in the daytime, I couldn't take pictures at night, I didn't have a flash. Then I took a series of pictures every hour or so of the fern and then showed these rapidly by putting them together in a flick book. And this way then what took a day or two or several hours to happen was compressed into several seconds. So the compression of time photographically fascinated me.

Us too. If Oliver Sacks could make a baby fern unfurl, Robert, how about this? Radio producer Tony Schwartz can do the same thing with his baby niece. What? Except in sound. Here, spout up for your appreciation is Nancy Schwartz, from birth to age 12 in 2 minutes, 12 seconds exactly. And Jill went up pale, Jack fell down, and Jill came tumbling.

Say, Daddy. And a ballerina costume, that's what you get, but when Santa Claus can't bring you, you can crawl. Tony, if you have to make him a house broken, if he makes a really in the apartment, you have to slap him with a newspaper, then if he doesn't do it again, he's housebroken. What do you think of the Russians sending the dog up in the satellite? Well, I hope he doesn't get hurt, but if he does, I'm sure they'll send up a medical satellite. In school, we each had to do a report on some place. and I'm doing a report on Hawaii

and we're taking notes and doing research. This summer we're going camping in in the month of July, this summer I'm going for the whole month of July, this summer I'm going to go to Brownie Sleepaway Camp. It's all girls. You'll mess my hair and it's very special for tonight. It's just the way I want it.

It's a page boy with a high top and that's the way I like it. I'm taking guitar lessons and that's fun. I take drama lessons after school Well, that's great. And I've been working on the school newspaper. I might be edited next year. And I've been discovering boys. You know what that is?

What's that? That is, if you were a parent, what you've just heard is a parent clock. Huh, a parent clock. That's kind of cool. Because the kid gets older, you can't deny the fact that you must be getting older, too. When your son has hair on his legs, I thought, oh man, I'm getting old. But this is true. This is how the whole world works, I think.

It's everything is a clock, I guess. Yeah. By the way, that was Nancy Gros Up, an audio flipbook recorded and arranged by the great radio producer Tony Schwartz, thanks to him, and to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and also to you, Mr. Robert Crowicz, for joining me today on our program to talk about time. So here's my question. If we've got an example of what you just called apparent. clock. You've got other kinds of time, you know, like personal time, getting out of bed time, going to sleep time. Most of existence, really, time was measured by, oh, it's lunch time, it's wake up time, it's time to milk the cow time, events or task times. Tasks times. How do we get from task and personal time to clock time? Now, that's interesting. Let's go back to the 1800s,

and imagine a guy will call him O Zoltan Treboigen. Zoltan Treboigan. Living in Sandusby, Ohio. And suppose Zoltan wants to know, you know, what time it is. Okay. So, if Zoltan walked into, say, Bigsby's tavern and asked... Mr. Bigsby, could I trouble you for the time? It's right in front of you.

You see this clock here. It's built by my nephew, not the smartest boy in the world. It says 33 minutes past the hour. Is that right? Of course it's right. However, if Zoltan, instead of going into the tavern, had he gone at the exact same moment into the bank building? How can I help you, sir?

I wonder if you could show me the time. Three minutes past the up. Is he right, though? Yes, it's right. Or, at that very same moment, suppose instead of going to the tavern of the bank, he'd gone to the hotel. Can I help you?

Could you tell me the time, please? Yes, of course. My timepiece here says... Oh, is that silver? Silver style, actually. It's 19 past the hour. So at the tavern, it's 33 past the hour, at the hotel 19 past, the bank three past. What time is it really in Sandusky?

That's the question. The answer is, there was no official time in Sandusky. What do you mean there's no official time in San Dusky? There wasn't any, not in 1850. The government didn't have a time. Really? All there were were clocks. So in Ohio, in the 1850s, you'd have as many times as there were clocks in the town.

So there was no reason, when you think about it, to synchronize. If your clock and my clock were four minutes or ten minutes different in San Diego. in 1850s, who cares? Until... The railroad changed everything. Once the railroad came in, if Zoltan wanted to take... I don't know. How about the 303 to Cleveland?

Okay. If you wanted to take the 303 to Cleveland, how would he know when it was 303? Oh, I see where you're going with this. If you went by the Banks' clock, he'd arrive a half hour ahead of time. If you went by the hotel clock, he'd arrive in the nicotine. Wait, wait, wait. And if you went by the tavern's clock... Oh, no!

Wait! So, for the sake of their business, really, railroads created railroad time and began putting up clocks of their own. That makes sense. And because the railroads were so important, I mean, the tavern would have to get its beer deliveries from the railroad. And I guess the banks would have to get their cash from the railroad, and the hotel would have to get their guests from the railroad.

So gradually, railroad time becomes everybody's time. So what happened to local time? Well, local time disappeared. Really? Yeah, if local time means that when it's noon in Sandusky, the sun is directly over your head. By 1880, that wasn't true anymore. Oh. The railroad had instructed Sandusky that from now on, its noon would be 20 minutes later,

so that it could fit into the railroad schedule. Wait, so they moved noon over 20 minutes? Yeah, and they were protests about this. I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, who owns noon in Sandusky? So in all seriousness, people fought against this? They rebelled against the railroads? Oh, there were time wars in certain towns where part of the town would go to railroad time,

but the other part would determinedly stick with what used to be local time and they'd have different times in the town. Wow. It's almost like it was a personal freedom issue or something. Yeah, because time in a way represents your own identity. and they didn't want to give up their identity to the railroad, not at first. But in the end, Sandusky, and then every other town eventually conformed to railroad time. And that is how time became standardized, time became zoned, time became clock reference. And you ask somebody, what time is it?

They don't say, you know, oh, it's bedtime or it's lunchtime. They don't look up at the sun. They look at a clock, a standard clock, and the railroads did that. Every tick of the clock is time won or lost. Every 60-minute sweep, every 12-hour tour of those relentless hands is turning out carload lots of time. There's an interesting connection to explore here, and it has to do with horses. Horses? Horses.

You mentioned railroad companies. It just so happens that the owner of the biggest railroad company, Leland Stanford, you know, as in Stanford University. He was really into speed, and he owned a really really... fast horse, and the horse's name was Oxident. Oxygen. I remember that. Story goes, this horse was the subject of a gentleman's bet. Well, there was no gentleman's bet.

It's a myth. Stanford, so far as we know, was not a betting man. That's Rebecca Solnit. She would know. She wrote a book about this called River of Shadows, and the focus of her book is the solver of the bet, or whatever it was. It was an argument. There's no evidence that there was money on it. In any case, this

argument amongst Stanford and his railroad buddy sent it around the following question, when a horse Gallops do all four of its feet leave the ground at once. What do you think? I don't know. It's not a question I would frankly ever ask anyone, but... Well, at the time, it was a big question because they had no way of knowing, because horses moved faster than eyeballs can see. So Leland Stanford wanted to prove that a horse had all four feet off the ground at one time,

and he was recommended to try Moibridge as the photographer to capture this. Along comes, Edward Moybridge, the photographer. If he could take a picture of the horse at exactly the right instant, he could see whether all four feet were off the ground and solved the bet. Here's the problem. Cameras in those days were very slow. A fast exposure would be maybe a second or several seconds.

Moybridge was going to push photography to suddenly be able to capture motion in a 500th of a second. Otherwise, you just got blur. Blur. Imagine that first step out of the world of the blur. Moibridge had stretched a wire across the racetrack and attached it to the shutter mechanism on his camera.

Oxygen the horse gallops by, trips the wire, which freezes the horse, mid-galop, steals him right out of the flow of time. Except Moevich doesn't just take one photo, he takes 24. See, it placed 24 cameras in a line one after the other with 24 trip wires stretching across the racetrack. And the horse tripped every one. 24 frozen, unblurry, running horses. So what did they see? Well, the pictures formed a series of a horse running in some of those photos showed Oxen, yes, with all four feet off the ground.

So the camera here unlocks a secret. Let's just see something you could never see before because this camera essentially it stops time. Exactly. Meanwhile, says Rebecca Moybridge became fascinated with learning more secrets of time. Secrets locked inside basic human movements. A leap, a splash, a walk, a pirouette. Wow, how mundane. But they're so enchanted.

when you really pay attention to them. Moabridge had photographed rushing water. He was obsessed with water in his landscape pictures. So he obsessively has people pour water, splash water, pour water over themselves, pour pictures of water, pour water into glasses, splash water out of basins, bathe in water. And you can see all these droplets frozen in midair.

There's one particular photo, Robert, where you see a sheet of water suspended in the air hovering over the splasher. kind of like a ghost. Hmm. Oh, wow. Anyhow, take all those frozen moments and align them one after the other and play them back, and you've got flow again.

Albeit artificial flow, which we call movies. Movies are good. Yeah, yeah. But the next time you're feeling stressed out and you say to yourself, I'm stressed, I need to go to a movie to relax. Well, you should know that the technology that made the movies is exactly the thing, which sped up the pace of modern life, which stressed you out, which led you to go to the movie. movies.

I don't, what does that mean? What do you mean by that? Well, one of the first ways movies were used was to film factory workers doing repetitive tasks and then find out how to make those tasks more efficient. So if I were pushing the levers maybe too slowly, is this? Right, they would find the guy who did it the right way, film him, slow the film down, and then use that to teach everyone else. And then when World War II came, this was not just now in the cause of efficiency. This was a life or death matter because this is how you beat Nazis.

All the scientific devices of chronology are machines manufacturing time that told that in our hands means victory. And our hands must be as relentless as the hands of our plots. Or there's a whole other way to think about this. Time can be a weapon in battle, or it can be the most sensuous and subtle and natural thing in the world. And I learned about this from a book by, by Jay Griffith's called A Sideways Look at Time.

Let me just take a stop here at clocks, even though you don't like clocks, because there's so many cool clocks in your book. Cool clocks. First of all, there's a spice clock. Yes. We're used to clocks, which you can see when it's really dark, and you can see that you've just woken up at 2.35, and you really didn't want to wake up at 235. But, of course, for a long time, you know, in the night, you don't have a way of seeing what the time is.

And so somebody invented a spice clock so you could taste your way through the nights. So there would be maybe kind of, you know, cinnamon for about one o'clock and turmeric for two o'clock. So you're sitting there in bed and you sniff the time. Oh, you could taste it. Right, how about the clock of birds? This is the colloly people.

Oh, yes. Now, this is lovely. The Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, they have what they call a clock of birds and that certain birds like the New Guinea friar bird and the hooded butch bird, when they sing in the mornings, the children are taught.

ought to understand that that's a signal to get up and leave and, you know, get out of the house. When those birds sing their late afternoon calls, that's a signal to the children to go back home. The forest in the central hinds and Papua New Guinea. I've been there. It's a very, very difficult place to be in once it's dark, and that children would need to know at what time to start heading for home. Now how about it's 1751 and Carl Lerner, Linnaeus, famous categorizer of everything. Yes, made a flower clock.

What do you make? A flower clock so that you could see by the blooming of different flowers what time it was. Something that blooms in the morning and then folds up, like a morning glory would be there in the morning. And then in the evening and evening primrose would come out. But these are all plants that open for an hour or two and then close. So if you're walking by and you see a blush of, let's say, pink, then you know, oh, it must be in the morning. Or if you see a blush of purple, oh, it must be lunchtime or whatever it is. Yes, exactly, exactly.

That's, by the way, very, very good gardening to be able to do that. Yes, isn't it, isn't it? And connected to that, there's also in the Andaman forests and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, that people have a scent calendar, which I found the most beautiful idea, because what it was is a way of kind of describing the months by the sense of certain fruits and flowers. Time is everywhere. nature. One of the things I wanted to do with the whole book was to say, you know, we think of time being to do with clocks. In fact, for most of the world, for most of history, time has been

absolutely embedded in nature in some beautiful ways. We'll hear more from author Jay Griffith later in the program. Thanks, Robert. You're all, thank you. I'm Chad Aboum-Rod, Robert Crubwich and I will be back in a moment. You're listening to Radio Lab. On New York Public Radio. Public Radio W&N. This is Matt Bushka And Alyssa Old Crow In Gainesville, Florida And Radio Lab is supported in part

by the National Science Foundation And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org Thanks. I'm Chad Avumrad. This is Radio Lab. Our program today is about time.

all the different flavors of time. And here with me to, shall we say, taste those flavors, is Robert Crowich, correspondent for ABC News and Nightline. Yeah, hi. Robert, we've been talking about clocks for the last 20 minutes. And if you took all the clocks... Ooh, you've been counting. 20 minutes, exactly.

If you took away all the clocks we've been talking about, the bird clock and the spice clock and the clock on the wall, and then you had to talk about time without mentioning a clock, what are we left with? How would you do it? That's actually a pretty tough question. is time essentially. I have a neighbor.

Brian Green, who's the best-selling author, elegant universe, fabric of the cosmos most recently, professor of math at Columbia, professor of physics at Columbia, pretty much does Columbia. I asked him, your question,

I asked him, what is time? If you really pushed me and said, what is time? I'd say time is that which allows us to see that something has changed. When you see the second hand in your clock going around, it's changing position.

And that's the simplest version of a change corresponding to time elapsing. Okay, Robert, I'm looking at the clock here on the wall. And I'm watching the second hand and it is changing positions, just as he said. Now, I imagine all the clocks in the world agree on what a second is. But what if we were to take the clocks away? Is there, I mean, I still, in my bones, believe that somewhere there is a clock ticking that says what a second is. And it's always the same.

And that's the same in Mars. Yeah. Right. Everybody thinks that because it's so sensible that time is human. universally the same for everyone. Now, here's the big secret. Apparently, that's not true. Time is not universal. And this is, Brian, is part of Einstein's theory of relativity. When we move relative to each other, a very basic lesson of relativity is that our watches will tick off time at different rates. If you have a good watch, I don't know what a good watch today is, I don't own one, but if you had a Rolex, I never have owned a watch. Is that right? You've never owned a watch? I never owned a watch. I never like the idea of a timepiece. of taking away on my arm. It really always bothered me. But anyway, if you had a Rolex and I had a Rolex say, and we synchronize them perfectly, then we move relative to one another, and then we rejoin and compare our watches, they will not agree. Well, to demonstrate what Brian was talking

about, we are now in the Central Park. We've got the area entirely roped off, because we are going to demonstrate one of Einstein's famous thought experiments. All right. Which suggests that the subject, and if you will, I would be the subject, Chad, by all means. The subject must take a trip at an extraordinarily high speed. That's required here. So if you can help me by giving me whatever you've got over there. Sure. Here is a jetpack, turbocharged jetpack.

Put it on. Back and... Okay, now take these rollerblades. Oh, okay. Now put one on your right foot. On your left, Jake. Set the target speed dial on your jetpack to 669 million miles. and hours.

That's a little fast. 669 million miles an hour. All right. What time does your watch say? Uh, 524. So does mine. We're synchronized. Exactly synchronized.

Okay. When it gets a 525 in 3, 2, 1, push the red button. Hitting the red button and... The planet Earth and I see a galaxy going by on this side. I see another one coming up over there. Ooh! Another galaxy going by there. Now, by the way, my watch is absolutely quiet.

perfectly. I'm having a lovely time. I'm coming around. I'm coming around the back end. Coming in now. Coming in now. Coming closer. Coming closer and landed. That was very racing. Now, Robert. Look at your watch. All right. What time does it say? It says 526. What times are on your watch?

533. That's a seven minute difference. Is your watch broken? No, no, no, no, no. Time for you is different. than time for me. You mean literally? Literally, it's not that my watch somehow was shooking up and wasn't functioning properly, no.

Time itself is not some universal concept. Time is held by the individual, by the observer, so that if I am moving relative to you, time for me elapses at a different rate than it does for you. So relativity says that time and speed are mysteriously coupled So when I go fast, my time goes slow. Which explains why our watches don't agree. Exactly.

So this whole notion that we all have, that time kind of applies the same to everybody on Earth and Mars, Jupiter, the entire cosmos that we can see, is totally wrong. But let me ask you this. When you were rushing through space before, your time was apparently going slower, but did you feel slower? If I'd looked at my watch, everything was perfectly normal to me. My clock was ticking perfectly normal. for me. Well, so is mine in Central Park, so what gives? But if somehow you could have peered in on me up there in outer space, going real, real fast, I would have seemed slower to you. Ah. Not only would my watch be ticking slower for you,

everything about me would be behaving slow to you. So what do you do with this information? What do you mean? Well, physics teaches us that if I'm, say, running down the street, and my time is ticking infinitesimally slower than that guy's time over there. Why? Because he's standing still. Oh, yeah, and you're running.

Right. So you're in different time capsules, kind of. Apparently so. And I know this is what science tells me. Right. But my common sense tells me that that is completely wrong. Nothing in my experience tells me this is the case. This is like one of the great conundrums, it seems to me,

that what you learn in science is so. different what you feel in your regular life. How do you live between those two worlds? What you know and what you feel are so different. Brian, do you learn to trust your mind over your senses? Is that what you do? Well, I learn to trust my senses, but see them within a much larger framework. I love to walk down the street. And imagine that because I'm walking, I'm kind of shattering the time around me. I'm causing time to elapse at a different rate than it would if I were standing still. I love that idea. It's not that I don't trust experience.

So when you're hitting time square and you're wandering through you, think, oh boy, I am really changing the universe of all these other people. Well, I really consider it totally personal, so I'm not changing their time. So I'm changing the rate at which time elapses for me. So I have power. So when you run to catch a bus, you think, hey, I got to get on this bus. Also, I'm slowing down time for myself. I do sometimes. Not always, but it's there.

And, you know, when I look at the tabletop, I delight in the fact that I can, in my mind, picture the atoms and molecules and the interactions between them in the mostly empty space that's in there. And that when my hand touches the tabletop, I see the electrons in the outer surface of my hand pushing against the electrons in the outer surface of the table. I'm not really touching the table. My hand never comes into contact with the table. What's happening is the electrons are getting really close together and they're a bit. propelling each other. And I love the fact that I'm in essence deforming the surface of the table by making my electrons come really close to it. That enriches my experience. It doesn't help. Do you share this with others? Rarely.

You're listening to Radio Lab. On New York Public Radio, WN. Y, C. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad. I boom. We're talking about time today and hear with me to help me do that is Robert Crowich, ABC News, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. Blah, blah. Blah is my specialty. Which is her from Brian Green, physicist, tell us about a frankly troubling idea that there is no such thing as a standard time, which I'm still having trouble believing, frankly. In any case, it makes me think of this. Do you know when you see a tortoise wandering through the garden?

Sure. And he's going so slow. Uh-huh. And then you see a hummingbird whizz by. Clearly they're moving at different tempos, but perhaps they're also experiencing entirely different universes of time. Do you ever wonder about that? I think everybody wonders that. But of course, unless you are a hummingbird or a tortoise, you can never really know whether what's going on in your head is different.

True. But Oliver Sacks, the neurologist we met before, he found a different tempo, radically different tempos in human beings. Really? He's a neurologist, and he worked at a hospital in the Bronx, still does, at Beth Abraham. where he once had patients who seemed so slow, they were almost frozen. He told me about one of those patients named Myron V. For long periods of the day, Maron would be apparently emotionless, although when I looked at him, I would see his frozen figure in different positions

in which his right hand would be raised. A lot of these patients would be frozen in odd positions. which I'm illustrating now, but... Little balletic poses, hand in the air, but just stuck, stuck in space. People would be stuck in odd poses. I thought Marwan was one of those, and I commented on this that I had often seen him stuck in these frozen poses. And he got indignant and said, what do you mean, frozen poses?

He said, I was just wiping my nose. And I said, you're joking, putting me on. and he said I'm not and he was he was as puzzled by what I said as I was by what he had said but then after he had told me this I thought well

hell you know I must watch this and I must record it and he said he was just what he was just wiping his nose he said I was just wiping my nose okay now that's something that takes me about two seconds roughly whereas apparently this movement of the arm

if this is what he was doing was taking about two hours. So I took a series of photographs at intervals of a few minutes each. Of still Myron with his arms gently going up. Of apparently Still Maron. How many photographs did you? I had about 20 photographs or so in two hours.

And then I put them together in a little flick pack. You know, the way one used to do is a kid. And then one could in fact see with this that the 20 or so photos covering two hours, in fact, showed a smooth movement to wipe his nose, a movement which normally takes two seconds, but which in him was taking two hours. Although this left open, the profound puzzle of how come he was not only taking two hours to do so, but didn't realize he was taking two hours to do so, that the movement which to us was glacially slow was not slow to him, was normal.

ever show Myron the pictures that you had made? Yes. And then did you say, so Myron, look at this. It took you two hours to do this. I mean, if you did that, what did he say? He was astonished, and that's too mild a word. He was thunderstruck. Wow.

So Myron had no idea that he was experiencing the world slower than the rest of us. Not until Oliver staple all the pictures into a flipbook and go and sped up time. And then Myron can see what it was he was doing. But, you know, does a turtle know that he's processing slowly? Does a hummingbird know that it's processing fast? I don't think so. But in this case, we now know that this is a human being absorbing and performing at drastically different tempos

from the rest of humanity. Oliver has another patient he likes to talk about. Her name is Hester Y. Hester, she would have the opposite of the slowing or glaciation. She would move with extreme speed. And this came out very, very clearly sometimes when I had the students play ball with Hester. What does that mean? They play catch?

Yeah, they play catch. I'm sorry, is that the wrong word? Play ball. Play catch, right. Because one of the striking things when people are Parkinsonian is when people may appear unable to initiate any action, they can reciprocate. And if you suddenly throw a ball to someone with Parkinsonism, even if they appear absolutely frozen, they will catch it. And often I would demonstrate this to the students.

I would usually have seven or eight students, and we would usually sit in a semicircle around the patient, so Hester would be in her chair with a semicircle of students facing her. And she was so quick, and the ball came back and hit the student on his throwing hand. Wow. So the guy throws the ball at Hester. She catches the ball and throws it back before he's even. put his hand back in place.

Just so. How many times faster is Hester moving than the student? Well, let me put it in general terms. Her reaction time is a tenth of a second or less, and usually the best reaction times of Olympic athletes is about a seventh of a second. Anyhow, the ball came back very, very fast. And I would say to Hester, slow down.

You're too quick for them. Why don't you count up to ten, pause before you, throw the ball back, count up to ten. She's still in her very speedy mode. And she was saying, okay, okay. And the ball would come back scarcely slower. And I would say, I asked you to count up to ten. And a voice which I really can't imitate,

but this is the crushed voice. The technical term is tachepemia, rather speech, and the crushed voice of extreme Parkinsonism. She would say, I dig out, I decount up to ten. I can't speak quick enough for that. And her brain, was she thinking that she was giving normal speech?

Yeah. She was no more conscious of her speed than Mowen was of his slowness. Huh. So Myron has somehow slipped into whale time or turtle time because of the disease, which sent Hester in the opposite direction into a kind of hummingbird tempo. Do you think there's a limit to this, how fast she can go or how slow he might slow? Well, I guess there must be like some kind of physical limits. if she wanted to say 20,000 words in a second and could even get her brain to do so, her mouth wouldn't work that fast. Her tongue wouldn't work that fast.

So there's constraints like gravity, energy, the nature of your body. So we are... What about the rest of us? What kind of range is available to you or I? I am not sure that such radical slowings or speedings occur in the rest of us,

except perhaps in very unusual circumstances, perhaps in sports and perhaps in situations of mortal danger. People who are in the zone, they may give descriptions of what appears to be. A baseball comes towards one at 100 miles an hour, but some batters, are they called batters? Yeah. Okay. People at bat. Okay.

But people at bat may say that the ball seem to come to them more slowly and that they could see the seams on the ball. In the zone, Robert. I happen to have something here, which is a perfect illustration of what he's talking about. Uh-huh. Except it's not baseball. It has to do with track. Track's good. Here's the short excerpt. When I'm up, they call my name.

I step up on the runway. Usually it's just... Relax. You are the best. Plant. And I don't think anything else after that. I want that adrenaline coming when he says run is take the mark. Because I only got 10 seconds.

or nine seconds at that point, you know. But if it's pumping, pumping, pump and pumping, then they say take your mark, well, I'm exhausted. You know, once I get in the blocks, it's like, I don't want to be exhausted. I want to be on fire at that moment. So I'm like, I'm ready, I'm ready. Temperatures is 52 degrees, 52 degrees out there.

The body's warmed up, sitting in the blocks. I'm like, the cold ain't even phrasing me. I don't even feel no cold, because I got so much adrenaline going through my body. I'm just ready to put it to them today, put it to everybody. And if you're not ready, it doesn't matter at this point because you have to be ready. And when he says set, set, sitting there thinking. This gun go out and leave them. Give it all you got.

Just take it out from the gun and just hold on. You go feel the strength out there when you don't go slow down, no fatigue or nothing going to come over. Whoever's in the lane's behind me, they go get it. Just listening, get in tune, get in tune, listen to the whole hush of the crowd. is they get required for the gun in that moment when they say take your mark set I become the gun

so when that gun fires it's almost like I'm the bullet being fired out of the pistol and that's my reaction when I hear that sound it's almost like there's a firing pin

smacking me in my butt and pushing me so it's not that I sound out everything around me I've already sounded out everything because I'm the bullet, and it's only me in the chamber. You line up, you hear the gun and say set, and at that point you become blind and deaf, because you don't go off of what you think you've heard, because if you do that, you just lost a race. You have to be one with the gun.

And when he says set, I just breathe all the air in. I take a deep inhale. Take one last look out my competitors in the lane. Now I'm focused. Just thinking drive and go, drive and go. And then I hold my breath. And then... Sweet, sweet, sweet, drive, drive, drive, pick them up, pick them up, pick them up.

I let all the air out and that's when I start running as fast as I can. When you're running and you're so relaxed in what you're doing to where a song can just pop into your mind about 30 meters, that is the ultimate point I think an athlete wants to be because that's when you get that peak performance. It's almost like everything is moving in slow motion and you watching the birds kind of slowly fly by and you hear that song just whistling in your ear.

When I take off and I start to climb in the air, it all goes pretty fast. But once I hit that apex of the jump and my hips are up over the bar, time really slows down. I mean, you can just feel this rotation and it feels like someone's grabbed a hold of your hips and really giving you a push, a boost up in the air. And for this moment that you're sort of suspended on top of the bar, it's really serene. It's really almost peaceful.

It just seems like it lasts in eternity. Come off the turn, I'm in the front, I'm in the front. I know they're coming from and they stop from me like cheat on everything. I'm in the front. So I'm just thinking, just get away, just get away, just get away. Turn on the aftergram. Hold on, just stretch it out, start going. Get to the top of the curve. Turn on the out of the ground. Hold on, pow, pow, pow. Powering down like a train.

See him come up beside me at the Currifield. You gotta hold on. This is always happening. They're trying to get you at the end. You can fight them off. You can fight them on. At the end, it's just compete, compete, compete, and then lean at the tape.

Go ahead, reach and go, reach and go, reach you go. Puck them on, punk them on, punk the malls, get across the lines, just smile out, smile out. And we get down to the tape. And we get down to the tape. Get out of a half of a step. That's kind of stuff I live for, but I live for those intense moments like that again, right there. It's hard to accept the fact sometimes that you are human, but it's true, and I've had a heart surgery in year 2000,

but as athletes, and you can ask almost any athlete, they'll tell you, we believe we're invincible. Because if we go in there with any other thought, there's no chance of us come. no chance of us accomplishing our goal because we have to believe we have to confuse ourselves into believing that no matter what's wrong with you or what you're dealing with it's not going to be a factor to what you're trying to accomplish we believe we're invisible thanks to the next big thing and sound artist ben ruben for that a piece he produced for the national track and field hall of fame you can visit them on the web at trackhall.com so robert what do you think this was a case i think of athletes showing you how we contest with time, get power by mastering time, shaving it slightly.

Time and power have a long history. That's what we'll look at shortly. I'm Chad Epumran. Robert Crowich and I will be back in a moment. You're listening to to Radio Lab. Hi, I'm Bill Schiller from Oak Harbor, Washington. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad I boomrod. My guest today is Robert Crawlwich, the science correspondent for ABC News, Nova, and Nightline. And we're talking about time. The freezing of, the speeding up of, the slowing down of. the bizarre science of, and now the politics of time. Speaking of which, my interview with, remember Jay Griffith from we heard in the previous whatever section, she began her interview with me with a strange declaration which she read off a piece of paper. This is the independent free state of Trulheim.

We have no allegiance to the government. We do not recognize history, patriarchy, matriarchy, politics, communists, fascists, all lollipop men or ladies. We have a hierarchy based on dog worship. Our currency is to be based on the quag barter system. Do not recognize the Gregorian calendar. By doing so, this day shall be known as one. Be afraid, be afraid, all ye that here, respect this state. What was that?

That was the manifesto of British anti-road protests in the mid-90s. The British anti-road protesting? Yes. These people who don't like roads? Yes, environmentalists who were protesting against the building of roads. and one of the things that they chose to do was to write this self-governing manifesto pointing out that for them

they were not going to recognise Greenwich Mean Time At the time 3 hours, 24 minutes written needed universal time Time is a highly political subject It initially was the British sense of time which was transported all over the world Britain's ruled their empire through ruling the oceans

They ruled the oceans because they discovered chronometers of sufficient accuracy to discover longitude. What the British did in their empires was to insist on GMT, Greenwich Mean Time. And, you know, that other countries were sort of Greenwich Mean Time retarded a bit or advanced a bit. But essentially, ours was the norm. Ours was the real time in London. Also, not true. Of course, the British don't own the seas anymore, but we all still use Greenwich Mean Time. Absolutely, absolutely.

We're very used to thinking that empires are to do with land. What I'm arguing is that actually there have been empires of time. There's one story you tell about the rulers, this is the ruler of Turkmenistan, the current ruler of Turkmenistan, a guy named President Nyasov. Now, the month of January in Turkmenistan is called Turkmenbashi, and the month of April is called Gerben Sultan. Why are they called that? Well, he named one after himself and one after his mother.

You mean, everybody there in January calls it, you know, president of our country month or whatever? Well, I don't actually know whether, you know, that it's taken off in the street, as it were, and I rather suspect it probably hasn't. But what he wanted to do was, what, in fact, many rulers have wanted to do is to ally themselves with the clock and the calendar.

I mean, like Pol Pot decided that 1975 would be year zero. Paul Potts says, all right, everything starts with me. Yes, exactly. Everything starts with me now when I say it does. This is year zero. And to you, I guess, the joy of time, the deepest, most ecstatic version of it, is when you lose it completely. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's something that, you know, that in prayer, in meditation, in art, and in love, actually, is that people lose that, um, very, you know, fretful ticking off kind of sense of clock time. And what you fall into is something transcendent. You know, all that you have to have done is loved somebody to know that

and to hold them for half an hour and you can know that that half an hour has lasted an eternity. Time standing still in a moment like that is like a really swollen now. Yes, exactly, exactly. And that in a sense, you know, that's when the moment meets the eternal. That is all that matters is just this moment that you hold in your hand. Thanks, Robert. That was great. Oh, thank you. Jay Griffith is the author of A Sideways Look at Time.

You can find out more about her on our website, RadioLab.org. We'll close our program today on time, the way we started with an excerpt of a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You know the one. Uh-huh. Except this is not the way Beethoven would have intended it to be performed. The piece he wrote to last 70 minutes has been stretched to 24 hours. 24 hours. Yep, bringing it even closer to eternity.

Recently, a group of San Franciscans spent an entire weekend in a gallery, in a trance, listening to all 24 hours. It began on a Friday evening. It is 102 in the morning. It's 3.08. And went all night. So it's about 3.45 in the morning. It's 3.55 in the morning.

Sound artist Aaron Zim was there, otherwise known as the quiet American. The performance was at his gallery, in fact. To close our show today, we asked him to give us a taste of what it sounded like. It starts with these fifths. And then, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But, you know, here it's like... Even though it's like a very simple thing to do, to like say, okay, it's not going to be 90 minutes, it's going to be a day.

It still gives you that sense of flow. time or hanging time, a time that takes a long time to pass, that you have in certain places in your life where a major thing happens, it evokes that somehow. You know how people report that, you know, your life flashes before your eyes in a car crash or something like that? Time seems to slow down for people. It's like these really tense moments. What if you happen to be playing Beethoven's Night Symphony on, like, on your car stereo? Well, like you were going into some car crash or something. Would it slow down and sound like this?

The idea was to stretch something to 24 hours. By stretching Beethoven's 9th, I don't only stretch a piece of music, a stretch music history. Oh God, Beethoven for 24 hours. I'm just wondering if Beethoven is slowly spinning in his grave. Life Inge, that's my name. Here in San Francisco this weekend, this is the second full 24-over performance. Upstairs where the performance is going out has a good five. Everything seems very gentle.

The floor is completely covered with bean bags or pillows. The space has a really amazing acoustics. Sound system here was really good. What can I say? It's designed to be contemplative. Why would I do this? I have no idea why I'm doing it. Will I do it again?

I don't know. I want to see how I feel being exposed to one unique piece. My first response was a very calming response. And then when I walked in... And then I came in, it was overwhelming. It's peaceful. Open up. and expand.

So I had this thought that different animals based on probably their size and their heart rate might have different senses of time. Like you see a hummingbird zipping around in this manic way and you think, we humans must seem very slow to that hummingbird. Everything we do must almost be in slow motion to something that can just deal with things that quickly. And to a whale, there's some huge animal with a heart rate that is like once every few minutes. We must seem really fast. This piece is kind of like that.

Suddenly, I felt like I was moving at hummingbird speed. It's growing and growing and growing, and growing, and you're just wanting it to climax, and it's not going to, or it is, rather, it is climaxing, but it's just taking place over such a long time that to us, in our little small human time, it doesn't feel like it's climaxing. It's true, it doesn't really climax.

The climax never happens. The denim one of recovery. It's like euphoria right. At this speed. Sometimes people smile. I don't know. Maybe somebody else ran out screaming. I'm really buzzed.

I'm really excited. Oh, it's like an ecstatic apocalypse. The other thing I felt when I came in and continued to feel like it. I was being lifted up. It was just a constant lift, lifting, lifting. There was no ending. Just a constant lift, lift, lifting, lifting. That was produced by.

sound artist Aaron Zim, with help from Bronwyn Zim and Jeremiah Moore. You can find more of Aaron's work on our website, RadioLab.org. Chad, I was actually going to be the long A-vowel and the A-Limension sequence, but I was unable to make it to San Francisco. I guess we've got to get out of here. Yeah, we should close the show. This week's show was produced by myself and Ellen Horn. With help from Robert Krollwich, Max Bach, Brenna Farrell,

Miguel Gomez-Esterne, Sally Herships, Miyuki, Yacirot Ranta, Amy O'Leary, Fulcan Unsel, and Trent Wolli. Special thanks to Andy Lancet

and Ben Adair. Very special thanks to all the track and field athletes featured in this show. John Crawford, Amy Akoff,

Brendan Cows, Derek Atkins, John Drumman, and Larry Wade. I'm Jason Pirate. All right, I hope that works for you.