Beyond Time

Summary

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Radiolab – "Beyond Time" (July 24, 2007)

Overview

In this episode of Radiolab, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich embark on an exploration of time—how we experience it, how science tries to explain or disprove it, and how humans attempt (often futilely) to outwit, reverse, or live outside of it. Through a blend of science, philosophy, and poignant storytelling, the episode features artists collaborating with time, physicists denying its existence, and ordinary people grappling with their fleeting place in history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Art and the Long Arc of Time

[00:52 – 05:09]

• The episode opens with artist Terry Wilcox and his colossal sculpture, anchored on a boulder above the Hudson River, constructed with aluminum and magnesium designed to merge through diffusion—a process that will take nearly 1,500 years.
• Wilcox hopes the sculpture lasts until the year 3500 AD, far outlasting contemporary civilization, acting as a collaboration with time itself.
• Kids interact with the sculpture, reflecting a universal urge to leave a trace on the future.

Notable Quote

• “He says this piece won’t be done until time takes the aluminum and magnesium and fuses them together, which he calculates will take 1,495 years. In a sense, that’s when this clock will chime.” — Jad Abumrad [02:09]

2. The Physics of Time – At the Colliders’ Edge

[06:00 – 10:41]

• Robert tours the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s particle collider, a place where scientists recreate conditions almost identical to those just after the Big Bang.
• Discussion with physicist Brian Greene about the elemental simplicity at the universe’s origin and how complexity (and time) builds outward from there.

Notable Quote

• “In some sense, being cast out of Eden by having all of those simple things come up and create very, very complex situations.” — Brian Greene [09:43]

3. Defying the Present: Life as Time Travel

[11:25 – 22:25]

• Marcus Lindeen visits artist David McDermott, an American who has dedicated his life to living in the 19th century, from chamber pots to period clothing, refusing credit cards and other trappings of modernity.
• McDermott expresses a deeply nostalgic, even metaphysical longing for “the place” of the past, seeing time as an ever-present, overlapping reality.
• For McDermott, “time experimentation” is possible: choosing to live in another era is a form of practical time travel.

Notable Quotes

• “Most people do not need to live in the present… through living in the past, I find secrets.” — David McDermott [11:51]
• “In order to travel in time, we have to first accept the principle that time is here, has always been here, and always will be here.” — David McDermott [20:34]

4. Time as an Illusion: Physics Challenges the Flow

[26:15 – 34:52]

• Physicists Brian Greene and Michio Kaku support a “block universe” view, where all moments in time exist simultaneously.
• Drawing inspiration from Einstein, who believed that the distinction between past, present, and future is a persistent illusion.
• This view calls into question the reality of free will, the possibility of choice, and our intuitive experience of time’s progression.

Notable Quotes

• “Each moment just exists... every moment is and is forever.” — Brian Greene [27:02]
• “Time beats at different rates depending upon how fast you move.” — Michio Kaku [30:21]

5. Quantum Possibilities: Parallel Universes & the Many Worlds

[35:23 – 40:07]

• Quantum theory's “many worlds” interpretation is discussed, where every possible outcome actually happens in a branching multiverse.
• The unsettling notion that we have “an infinite number of you’s” living out every possibility—yet the idea remains speculative.

Notable Exchange

• “So all the consequences that flow from my vanilla... I marry Vanilla, we have our lovely banilitos. But if I choose chocolate, I go into a mocha thing... Don’t you see that this is like dumb?” — Robert Krulwich [36:32]
• “This proposal... was not put forward in order to restore anything to do with free will.” — Brian Greene [37:14]

6. The Neuroscience of Free Will

[41:22 – 45:03]

• Referencing experiments by V. S. Ramachandran and others, the show highlights research showing that the brain initiates actions before we consciously “choose” them, undermining traditional notions of will.
• Raises deep questions about agency, responsibility, and the subjective sense of “deciding.”

Notable Quote

• “Even a simple thing like moving my finger, I can’t do on my own without the blip telling me ahead of time... your so-called thinking is a post hoc rationalization.” — Chad Abumrad [43:00]

7. Making Peace with Time: Life and Art in the Mojave

[47:27 – 61:05]

• In the Mojave Desert, Ben Adair interviews miners and desert dwellers—including artists like Marta Becket, a former New York dancer who created the Amargosa Opera House, and remembers sculptor Noah Purifoy.
• The sense of time here shifts from concern over legacy and memory (as in Wilcox’s sculpture) to acceptance of geologic and cosmic insignificance.
• The desert becomes a metaphor for both oblivion and creative possibility—where art, legends, and memories are inevitably reclaimed by wind and sand.

Notable Quotes

• “A hundred human empires will rise and fall in the time it takes Death Valley to notice our passing.” — Ben Adair [52:54]
• “A sculpture is never done, he surmised. After he built it, the weather continued the process.” — On Noah Purifoy [59:17]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes (with Timestamps)

• On collaborating with time:
  “Time cracks foundations, erodes borders, erases anything. Man creates civilization, art. Particularly art. Time hates art. That’s why museums have restorers. But here’s Terry trying to collaborate with time.” — Jad Abumrad [02:09]

• Physics’ view on time:
  “The time that we seem to experience as a continuous flow is actually not a flow at all... each moment just exists.” — Brian Greene [26:44]

• Einstein on the illusion of time:
  “Time is an illusion… there is no distinction between the past, the present, and the future.” — Michio Kaku quoting Einstein [31:30]

• Free will, or the lack thereof:
  “Even a simple thing like moving my finger, I can’t do on my own… your so-called thinking is a post hoc rationalization.” — Chad Abumrad [43:00]

• Desert perspective:
  “A hundred human empires will rise and fall in the time it takes Death Valley to notice our passing.” — Ben Adair [52:54]

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Episode Timeline

• [00:52 – 05:09]: Terry Wilcox and the 1,495-year sculpture
• [06:00 – 10:41]: Supercollider tour and the search for the universe’s beginnings
• [11:25 – 22:25]: David McDermott, living in the past
• [26:15 – 34:52]: Brian Greene & Michio Kaku on the “block universe” and Einstein’s legacy
• [35:23 – 40:07]: Parallel universes and quantum possibilities
• [41:22 – 45:03]: Neuroscience and the experimental challenge to free will
• [47:27 – 61:05]: Stories of the Mojave: miners, artists, and making peace with cosmic insignificance

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Concluding Reflections

• The episode closes on the understanding that while time may be an illusion or an eternal, unchanging block, the acts of art-making, remembering, and connecting with others remain deeply human.
• In the longest view—geologic, cosmic, or quantum—human endeavors seem ephemeral, yet in the moment, they are real and meaningful.

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Summary crafted in the inquisitive, playful, and occasionally philosophical tone characteristic of Radiolab’s hosts.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

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[Chad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

You're listening to radio on New York Public Radio.

[Jad Abumrad]

Public Radio wnycnyc.

[Robert Krulwich]

Speak.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is the sound of. What's this exact title of the piece? 3500 AD this is the sound of 3500 AD I'm knocking on an object that artist Terry Wilcox hopes will be here long after we all turn to dust.

[Chad Abumrad]

It's actually fastened to the bedrock. The engineering is it'll withstand a 200 mile hour wind.

[Jad Abumrad]

This thing right here, wow.

[Chad Abumrad]

It's like a nuclear bomb.

[Jad Abumrad]

30 years ago, Terry and a few cranes lifted this 40 foot stick and plunged it into this boulder that we're standing on, which overlooks the Hudson.

[Chad Abumrad]

And the George Washington Bridge is to our right.

[Jad Abumrad]

The sculpture reflects the sun like a mirror, and it's made out of two metals.

[Chad Abumrad]

Aluminum on the outside and magnesium pieces.

[Jad Abumrad]

The concept was simple. One day, many moons from now, these two metals will be one.

[Chad Abumrad]

The phenomenon is they're mixing together. How do you mean physically? The layers where the metals are touching, they're physically intermingling. They're evaporating into each other.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's a process called diffusion.

[Chad Abumrad]

Matter of fact, I'll tell you how I heard about it. 1968, they've opened some minor tomb in Egypt and they find gold and lead bars piled up in the corner. The Tomb was about 5,000 years old, and the bars have become a solid piece. They think it's happening on an atomic level, but they're not sure. But something is making the metals mix.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe just time. Time cracks foundations, erodes borders, erases anything. Man creates civilization, art. Particularly art. Time hates art. That's why museums have restorers. But here's Terry trying to collaborate with time. In fact, he says this piece won't be done until time takes the aluminum and the magnesium and fuses them together, which he calculates will take 1,495 years. In a sense, that is when this clock will chime. But until then, all you can really do is look at it. So we Walk around this piece.

[Chad Abumrad]

Oh, somebody made it up on this side. God bless you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Think they scaled up there on the bolt?

[Robert Krulwich]

Sure.

[Jad Abumrad]

It says bill. Bill number 98 or something underneath. Bill. 98. Park officials have slapped on some antique graffiti paint.

[Chad Abumrad]

Some of this paint's still wet.

[Jad Abumrad]

Terry pulls out a pocket knife and starts to chip some of it away. Underneath the paint, we find more graffiti.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah, it's the graffiti.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then we find a bullet hole.

[Chad Abumrad]

This is a bullet.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my gosh. Somebody shot your art.

[Chad Abumrad]

That's pretty funny.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you think it'll make it?

[Chad Abumrad]

Make what?

[Jad Abumrad]

The 3500 year journey.

[Chad Abumrad]

I have no idea.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you think the world will look like when this piece is finished? Do you think any of these buildings, the George Washington Bridge will be there?

[Chad Abumrad]

These buildings?

[Brian Greene]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

While I try to get Terry to philosophize with me, a group of kids approach. How old are you guys?

[Chad Abumrad]

15.

[Jad Abumrad]

Nobody?

[Chad Abumrad]

I'm 15. How long take to make it? Almost two years.

[Jad Abumrad]

And when he explains that it won't be done until these kids and their kids and 72 generations yet to come are all dead and gone, their reaction is interesting. How come you guys are touching? I mean, what makes you want to touch it and grab it? They begin to touch the sculpture, put their palms flat against it. A few even hug it. It's an odd sight, but understandable. And it comes perhaps from the same impulse as Terry's art as the graffiti, of wanting to leave something of yourself behind, send something of yourself forward into the future, as if to say, I was here, if only for an instant. I'm Chad Abumrad, and this is Radiolab. Today on our program, stories and conversations with people who swim upstream in the river of time, even though it's an impossible task. And speaking of the impossible, here is my co host, Robert Krovic.

[Robert Krulwich]

And in this hour, we will be having an argument with time. We will talk to scientists who say that time doesn't exist. We will talk to stubborn people who argue that, well, maybe it exists, but we're going to pretty much refuse to notice.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then we'll hear from a guy who thinks he can turn time around, turn it back, or defeat it through sheer will. Now, to get things started. Terry Wilcox, the guy we just heard from. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked him, what are you afraid of? A nuclear bomb maybe coming, blowing everything away, your sculpture included. And this is what he said.

[Chad Abumrad]

No, what scares me are the guys out at Stony Brook. They were just at our dinner. Two of these physicists who have the government funding and are trying to create a universe. I'm not kidding. I go like, you know what happened the last time a universe was created? And he says, yeah, they were kind of worried about that.

[Robert Krulwich]

They do very odd things at Stony.

[Jad Abumrad]

Brook, so it seems.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which is the location of one of the big super colliders in the eastern United States at Brookhaven. It's called Robert Krulwich. Yeah. And so I went on the tour with. The tour guide was named Todd. He was wearing, as I remember, a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. Now, it was a little freezing, but he said, all right, let me show you around.

[Chad Abumrad]

So we can give you a little tour around our ring. It's two and a half miles around. It's almost exactly the size of the Indy 500 racetrack.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we drove alongside a tube. I guess that's what it was. It was maybe 20, 25ft high, kind of like a tunnel covered with grass.

[Chad Abumrad]

So we've just driven around once, and.

[Robert Krulwich]

It took, I don't know, about 10, 15 minutes to get all the way around.

[Chad Abumrad]

Now, imagine doing that 78,000 times a second, and you're a proton.

[Robert Krulwich]

I have never been a proton, but this does sou fast. And because this is a collider, the idea here would be to have the proton collide or bump into something with such force and such violence that for one instant, it gets very hot. Hotter than the center of the sun, as hot as it got near the instant of creation. And that's why this is called a super collider. The universe one day was there.

[Chad Abumrad]

Right?

[Robert Krulwich]

You can't get before. Right. That's the mystery line.

[Chad Abumrad]

And that's what physicists call a singularity. Everything breaks down in principle, unless you're God. You can't look behind that because time doesn't even exist. Time ceases to have meaning then.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you want to tiptoe right up to the beginning. You can't get to the actual beginning, but to the first insta. Insta, Insta instant after the beginning.

[Chad Abumrad]

Right. We have a pretty good idea of how the universe looked up to a few seconds after the Big Bang. And what we're doing here is we're getting down in 2000ths of a second after the Big Bang.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're in a huge empty room roughly.

[Chad Abumrad]

The size of a blimp hangar, a blimp hanger, small blimp.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we are at one of the collision points right now. Right?

[Chad Abumrad]

One of the collision points right now is only about 45 or 50ft that way.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's the place in the collider where they expect to see these smash ups between two protons. And it's at these points you should get, just for an instant, the heat and the debris and the chaos. That's kind of like what the universe was like at the very beginning of time.

[Chad Abumrad]

This is the closest to the beginning of the universe you'll ever get. Give me a football and you can make a pass into the early universe.

[Robert Krulwich]

There's a kind of a funny sense, like of Eden that physicists have about the very first instance of the universe. Do you think that the beginning was more beautiful than now? Now it's pretty nice, but for some reason I noticed that people who do what you do love the beginning.

[Chad Abumrad]

Why is that? They love the questions. We can explain in a physical sense, using our little mathematical equations. Almost everything that we see now, what we try and do is we try and smash our rocks hard enough to get some glimpse of what happened then, because that's the untold story.

[Robert Krulwich]

In the beginning, there was a kind of simple beauty, very simple. So one of the motivating thoughts behind all these questions is, can I see it before it got complicated? Is that a part of this?

[Chad Abumrad]

That's a deep part of it. The further back you go, you hope, the simpler the explanations become, the more beautiful. In some sense, the modern world is ruled by complexity and chaos. The interactions of billions and billions of particles ending up in this conversation, among other things. And none of it is really predictable because it's very. It's complexity at its finest. So we're looking for the simple origins of things. And then you get the. In some sense, being cast out of Eden by having all of those simple things coming up and creating very, very complex situation.

[Robert Krulwich]

The world we have now has so many elements and elementary particles and rules and forces. It's messy. That's now then was just nicer.

[Jad Abumrad]

Moving right along. Here's a story about a guy who's like these physicists trying to move backwards to a simpler time. And his trajectory is not without its collisions, too. He's not a physicist, though. He thinks about physics. He's an artist. A painter sells paintings for thousands and thousands of dollars. But you might say that David McDermott's greatest work of art is himself. His obsessive devotion to living as if the present never happened. It's like standing at the shore and trying to keep the tide from coming in. It's impossible, but if you do it fiercely enough, it's also a little heroic. Swedish producer Marcus Lindeen visited David McDermott at his 19th century home in Ireland.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Walking into David McDermott's house is like stepping into an old photograph.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here. Coming.

[Robert Krulwich]

I can get warm.

[Marcus Lindeen]

We start in front of the fireplace.

[Robert Krulwich]

A fire heat will get you warm very quickly.

[Marcus Lindeen]

David wears a green flannel dressing gown, a white night cap and a fox fur around his neck. He sort of looks like a small old lady.

[Robert Krulwich]

When I sit and look into my fire, I can feel all the people that went before me and had their fires. That's the same fire that the earliest of human beings were looking at. Most people do not need to live in the present. Most people don't need to live in the present. Everybody doesn't need to live in the present. Through living in the past, I find secrets.

[Marcus Lindeen]

I'm here to learn his secrets.

[Robert Krulwich]

Great things, useful, really good things.

[Marcus Lindeen]

He shows me one of them.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, for example, here's the chamber pot.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Next to the bed, a blue porcelain bedpan.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's where the urine is. Right through peeing through the night.

[Marcus Lindeen]

He lifts the lid off and shows me his pee from last night.

[Robert Krulwich]

Most people hold their urine through the night or they break their sleep and they have to get up and pass through the house to get to an electrified bathroom. By the time they get back to bed, they've completely broken their sleep patterns. You can get out of your bed, you pee and you go back in your bed, but it's still enough time to stay in your dream.

[Marcus Lindeen]

He takes me to the bathroom to empty the bedpan.

[Robert Krulwich]

I mean, here's a bit of something new. There's very few modern things. I mean, here's something modern. Here's a bit of plastic, this cap on the toothpaste, see, Because I was going to throw that away just to show you, see? So I should move the plastic and I'll throw that away.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

Even though the toothpaste will dry at.

[Marcus Lindeen]

The top, you see, that is what you sacrifice dry toothpaste for. The realistic feeling to get rid of that cap. But how do you cope? This project seems so huge. It goes into so many details, so small details, like the toothpaste cap being in plastic.

[Robert Krulwich]

It does. But the past was not put together by one person. It wasn't put together by one person. And I am in a position of having to cover all areas. And you think it's easy to put that 19th century world back together? Well, it's not at all. It's very, very difficult because there's no one around any any longer who can do anything. I'm saying the past is so rich and so wealthy. Think that Every. Every year, 1918, every year has music, manners, science, magic, culture, architecture. Every year has that. And the contemporary people want to create more. They can't even deal with what they have.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Are we going to the kitchen?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Marcus Lindeen]

When he moved here a couple of years ago, he replaced everything new with something old.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you're having fun now. This was a whole modern kitchen, and I ripped this out.

[Marcus Lindeen]

He even had the newly renovated kitchen.

[Robert Krulwich]

Torn out because I ripped all the.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Modern out because it was too modern.

[Robert Krulwich]

And there was a modern floor. I ripped the modern floor up and I found the old floor. There used to be a wall here, and the door was. I made a conscious decision when I was 13 years old, and I decided that I would never be able to compete in the modern world. I listened to my teachers at the school and they explained what the modern world was about. And they told us that you had to constantly keep up with the moment. Keep up with the moment. Keep up with the moment, or you would be destroyed by the society. And I thought to myself, well, I'll never be able to compete. I'm still cleaning up. Oh, I'm going to squeeze you some orange. And so I thought, well, I'll go backwards. I'll talk to all the old people. I'll learn everything about the past, and I'll go backwards. I was already interested in the past. I loved history, and I was very interested in what had come before. I looked at the photograph, the old photographs of my family, and I thought, these are the same people, but what a different world. And I used to. I used to call the past. When I was younger, I used to call it the place, really, I called it the place. And I would say, I'm going to the place. And to me, the place was the same as this world. But everything was good.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Eventually, David stopped playing with kids his own age and instead stood outside beer halls and hair salons and talk to old people.

[Robert Krulwich]

Because there was a strange feeling I had when I was around these very old people. I felt like they knew something that I didn't know. I should tell you something else that is very interesting, which has to do with homosexuality. And that is that I didn't see it in the world that I grew up in. And I thought that homosexuality was something that didn't exist anymore. I thought that it was something from the past. And a lot of the books were medical books. It was all about treating it like it was a disease. So I thought it was some old disease that I had, you know, that was surfacing. And I kept it a secret. I kept it a secret for years.

[Marcus Lindeen]

David opens up a closet and shows me his old costumes and Hardy dresses from his younger days in New York.

[Robert Krulwich]

See, this is a shirt from the 18th century and it's the exact same shirt that I just saw in a museum that belonged to Lord Byron. And this is so old that it's evaporated. It's just evaporate.

[Marcus Lindeen]

In the 1980s, he and his partner Peter were known in the art world as the time Travelers. Did you ever meet Andy Warhol?

[Robert Krulwich]

I knew him.

[Marcus Lindeen]

What was it like?

[Robert Krulwich]

He was a queen.

[Marcus Lindeen]

At one point they were leading a group of 20 artists trying to recapture life in the 1920s.

[Robert Krulwich]

We had horses in Brooklyn. We kept horses. We had carriages. We were riding all upstate on the roads with these mad horse carriages. That was something. That was unbelievable.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Now it's only him.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello? Hello?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, oh, it's me and I'm sorry. And I'm waiting for this money to come in. You're not desperate, are you?

[Marcus Lindeen]

David owes someone money.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, bye.

[Marcus Lindeen]

And paying him presents sort of a problem. An unhappy collision between past and present.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let's not talk. We'll never get there otherwise.

Alright.

[Marcus Lindeen]

He refuses to use credit or the Internet, so he has to go to the bank to withdraw the cash in person. So we bike. David has lent me an old 19th century bike. Without any brakes, he bikes fast through the busy traffic streets of Dublin and I end up far behind him. We catch up later in the bank teller's line. So what was all the rush about? But you have to withdraw money or.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes, I have to come to the bank to withdraw money when I need it because I insist on doing the banking old fashioned.

[Marcus Lindeen]

But don't you feel frustrated now when you're like right in the middle of a modern bank with a television going on and all these modern things surrounding us?

[Robert Krulwich]

No, it's just the way that you might have a nightmare. Yeah, this is a nightmare.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Leaving David's apartment, going to the bank and then returning is a little disorienting. Like stepping in and out of a time capsule, safe and warm in his bedroom. He puts more coal on the fire and we sit down next to each other on the bed.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I won't make it right now. Here, take that off. So in terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I'm not talking to you about actual time time travel. I'm trying to talk in terms of practical terms that everyone can participate in this. I call it time experimentation.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Anyone, he claims, can choose their period in history, like watching a Merchant Ivory film and then stepping in.

[Robert Krulwich]

In order to travel in time, we have to first accept the principle that time is here, has always been here and always will be here. In other words, this moment in time that we're experiencing has always been here and always will be. That this moment in time, as you're listening now on the radio, as my voice comes across a wireless, this is a permanent fixture of the universe that I have always spoken on the radio and I always will speak on the radio, and you will always be listening and you always have been listening. Do you understand that concept? Do you understand the concept?

[Marcus Lindeen]

I try to explain to him that I do understand his idea, but only in theory. To me, time is linear. It just is. There is a past, a present and a future, and you can't jump in between. But David says that way of thinking is a trap.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's basically a death trap. And you will die. I love having you here. I'm having so much fun.

[Ben Adair]

Good.

[Marcus Lindeen]

We're in the library. The bookshelves are full of dust, yellowed books, old documents and sepia photos. On one of the shelves sits an old replica of a royal crown.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is probably something medieval with red.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Velvet and jewels on the side. David tries it on.

[Robert Krulwich]

I can transform reality in the world. This house and my man are with you. I am seducing you into the past. What do you think?

[Marcus Lindeen]

I think it's. I think it's super interesting.

[Robert Krulwich]

We could be having so much fun in this world, you know, instead of the stupid world we're living in.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks to Swedish producer Marcus Lindeen. If you'd like to see pictures of David McDermott's artwork, check our website, Radiolab.org I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay. You're listening to radio on New York.

[Jad Abumrad]

Public Radio, Public radio wnyc.

[Marcus Lindeen]

There's still more to come.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello, this is Abby Linne from Los Angeles, California. Radiolab 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

More information about [e-mail].

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service. That's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, rippling can help Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system. Designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busywork and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r-ip p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chad Abumrad]

I'm Alex Honl, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation.

[Robert Krulwich]

I wanted to let you know about.

[Chad Abumrad]

A brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas.

[Marcus Lindeen]

And big solutions from the people leading.

[Chad Abumrad]

The way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservationists of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries. Wherever you get your podcasts, you should.

[Robert Krulwich]

Tell the people who we are and.

[Chad Abumrad]

What our new show is. I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob.

[Robert Krulwich]

Goldstein and we used to host a show called Planet Money and now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and business is in history and some of the worst.

[Chad Abumrad]

People, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it business history. You know why?

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

Why?

[Robert Krulwich]

Because it's a show about the history of business.

[Brian Greene]

Available everywhere you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jad here with Robert Crowicz Today on Radiolab. Stories and conversations about people who are defying time. Swimming upstream in the river of time, you might say. And there's an extreme group of people who say there's no such thing as time, who deny it completely. We heard from one such person before the break. Here he is again.

[Robert Krulwich]

This moment in time that we're experiencing has always been here and always will be. That this moment in time, as you're listening now on the radio, this is a permanent fixture of the universe that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is David McDermott, an artist eccentric, wanted that so he's kind of easy to write off.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, I don't Even have to write him off because. Let me write him back on. Very prominent physicists, Brian Greene, for example, professor of mathematics at Columbia, author of many, many big fat books about this kind of stuff. He agrees with him.

[Brian Greene]

Well, here's the thing. Many of us who have thought about this have come to the conclusion that indeed, the time that we seem to experience as a continuous flow is actually not a flow at all.

[Robert Krulwich]

In other words, I have always spoken on the radio and I always will speak on the radio.

[Brian Greene]

Each moment just exists, and you will always be listening, eternally, if you will.

[Robert Krulwich]

And you always have been listening.

[Brian Greene]

It's not that the moment comes to life at one moment in time that we call the present and then somehow drifts away into the past. Every moment is and is forever.

[Robert Krulwich]

But to understand that concept. Do you understand the concept?

That's too weird.

[Brian Greene]

It's a tough idea.

[Robert Krulwich]

Let me just make it even tougher.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay?

[Robert Krulwich]

Imagine if I go and just hold my breath. That moment which I just thought up. I think that moment could last in Brian's world forever.

[Jad Abumrad]

Have you exhaled yet?

[Robert Krulwich]

No. And the exhale could last forever.

[Jad Abumrad]

Somewhere you're always inhaling, and somewhere you will be forever exhaling.

[Robert Krulwich]

A very, very strange notion, but it's.

[Jad Abumrad]

A notion that some would argue was shared by a guy I like to call Albert.

[Michio Kaku]

Well, it actually starts when Einstein was a child.

[Jad Abumrad]

Michio Kaku is professor of physics at City College in New York.

[Michio Kaku]

He read a children's book, perhaps the most important children's book ever written in the history of the human race.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was a book written by a German guy, Aaron Bernstein, which asks the.

[Michio Kaku]

Question, what would it be like to outrace a telegraph message in a telegraph wire?

[Jad Abumrad]

In other words, to outrace electricity. But this was only the beginning, because in Einstein's head, he thought of a different question.

[Michio Kaku]

What would it be like to outrace a light beam?

[Jad Abumrad]

What would it look like according to Einstein mythology? While normal boys worried about girls and jobs, Albert obsessed about light for years.

[Michio Kaku]

Then, when he was 26 years old, finally he was about to go berserk. He told his friend Besso that I'm going crazy thinking about this problem for 10 years.

[Jad Abumrad]

Bern, Switzerland. That's where he and Besso were living at the time and working as patent clerks. Story goes, one day, Einstein's riding the bus to work, and he gazes at the giant clock in the center of town.

[Michio Kaku]

It's a very famous clock, very pretty clock.

[Jad Abumrad]

You've probably seen pictures.

[Robert Krulwich]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, it's a famous clock.

[Michio Kaku]

Many people have speculated about that clock. But we found the letter, a letter.

[Jad Abumrad]

Again to his friend Bessa.

[Michio Kaku]

We found the letter saying that, yes, he was moving away from that famous clock tower in Bern, Switzerland, putt putting.

[Jad Abumrad]

Past bicyclists, pedestrians, and away from that big burn clock whose insistent ticking seemed to rule the world below. And then he had a thought. How would that clock look if his little bus suddenly zoomed off at the speed of light?

[Michio Kaku]

He said, now, wait a minute. If this bus is traveling at the speed of light, then light from the clock will never reach me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Meaning the light from all the subsequent ticks on that clock would never catch up to his eyeballs.

[Michio Kaku]

Therefore, the clock will be at rest. The clock will be stationary forever.

[Jad Abumrad]

But strangely, his pocket watch on his person, if he were to look at.

[Robert Krulwich]

That.

[Jad Abumrad]

It would be ticking just fine.

[Michio Kaku]

And then he said, quote, a storm broke in my mind. These are his exact words. A storm broke in my mind. And the very next day, he went to his friend Besso and says, I have solved everything.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what he said to his friend Besso, it's a very simple but radical idea.

[Michio Kaku]

Time beats at different rates depending upon how fast you move.

[Jad Abumrad]

If you go fast, your time slows down. Not just your clock, but your time, your brain, everything about you slows. And they've proven this. They've put clocks in airplanes, flown the airplanes around the world, had a clock on the ground when the airplane decelerated and landed. And they compared the two clocks. They were different, a little different, but they were different. Now, theoretically, the difference could be thousands of years depending on how fast the plane was traveling. Which raises a paradox. How can you have two completely different times, and both of them, according to Einstein, are equally true.

[Robert Krulwich]

Very, very puzzling. Because if you have a time that's true for you, right? And I have a time that's true.

[Jad Abumrad]

For me, and they're different, and they're different.

[Robert Krulwich]

Then what? What is it? What does time, what time do we have in common?

[Jad Abumrad]

Einstein struggled with this very question for many, many years. And toward the end of his life, according to Michio Kaku, he. He dropped a hint for how he might have resolved it in his mind, and it was at the funeral of his best friend, Besso.

[Michio Kaku]

Well, when Besso died, Einstein gave perhaps one of the most moving eulogies. He said time is an illusion that we who know know. There is no distinction between the past, the present, and the future. It's a very moving quote. And he essentially saying that in some sense, Bessel will live forever. Ever since then, we physicists have been trying to figure out, what did he mean by that?

[Robert Krulwich]

Maybe Albert Einstein was mourning his friend here and just didn't want him dead, and this was just poetry. But more likely it was his guess about the nature of time, how to handle the contradiction of two very different moments. Past moments, present moments. Brian Greene deals with this in his book Fabric of the Cosmos.

[Brian Greene]

The moments are. They just exist. And somehow it's the human mind in each moment that makes each moment seem real. December 31, 1999. I was at a New Year's party. And according to this way of thinking, I'll always be at that New Year's party. Because that moment is. It exists. It's not that it somehow goes away. My mind seems to organize things into moments that are gone and moments that have yet to be. But I think that's my mind organizing things. I don't think that's how the universe is put together. The moments just are.

[Robert Krulwich]

But look where that leaves us. That leaves us with. Everything that you've done in your life exists already.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everything.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Your beginning, your middle, and your end.

[Brian Greene]

Every moment of time is out there.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're dead somewhere. You're almost dead somewhere. Yes.

[Brian Greene]

There's no special.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now you're saying to me that there is no time. As I understand it, no time. Every moment of your life is already there, eternally frozen. Every moment of my life is frozen. Every moment of my children's life is frozen. And every moment of my great, great, great, great grandchildren's lives are already there and frozen. And so the universe is a vast collection of.

[Brian Greene]

Of nows.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nows.

[Brian Greene]

That's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's ridiculous.

[Robert Krulwich]

That is just ridiculous. I don't know why. It just seems, first of all, it denies so many things. It denies the poetry of change. Don't you see what's terribly unsatisfying about that? That means you don't have any options.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Brian Greene]

Free will is a very, very difficult question to answer for a physicist. Are you happy with this in terms of free will? Free will is a very troubling issue.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, you choose tonight to go to the movies, and I say, let's go to see Gone with the Wind. You say, no, let's go see Planet Zantar. Attack of the Return to the Devils of the she Devils. Don't you like to think that you have a real choice there? We could go to one.

[Brian Greene]

I would love to think it. Do I know for a fact that the thought and the impression of free will is really real? No, I don't know that in my heart, I tell you, I don't really know that. I suspect it's real because it feels so real. But there are so many things about the universe that we thought were real until we learned that they weren't.

[Robert Krulwich]

But what I want to know about the future is that I'm in some control of it.

[Brian Greene]

Yeah, I understand.

[Robert Krulwich]

I want to fall in love because I want to fall in love. I want to step across the sidewalk in front of that car because I want to commit suicide or whatever it is I want to do. And I don't want to have you or your pointy headed friends telling me that it's already there. And I'm going to somehow move from instant to instant, all pre planned. Then the poetry disappears, then the magic disappears. And then, most important of all, my command of myself disappears.

[Brian Greene]

Let me give you an alternative that reinstates some of the poetry, some of the free will that you're longing for. And I got to. I long for the same thing.

[Marcus Lindeen]

You don't.

[Jad Abumrad]

I do.

[Brian Greene]

I absolutely do. And I. And I feel like I have free will. I have. I feel like I have the ability to choose my next word. I feel like I can do that. Do I really have that freedom? I don't know. I think I do. And perhaps that's enough. Just the illusion of the freedom. But anyway, let me paint an alternative but highly related scenario. In quantum theory, some have suggested the so called many worlds interpretation that the universe is not a single entity. There are many universes, we call them parallel universes. Each of the choices that you make is borne out in one of these copies.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right, I'll give it to you. We're in a restaurant. I am sitting there and it's time for dessert. The waiter approaches and he says, would you like chocolate ice cream or vanilla? I think this over. If I choose vanilla, from then on I'm in the vanilla universe. But if I choose chocolate, I'm in the chocolate universe.

[Michio Kaku]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

So all the consequences that flow from my vanilla. I say vanilla and then somebody named Banilla happens to come in and I fall in love with vanilla and I marry vanilla. We have our lovely banilitos. But if I choose chocolate, I go into a mocha thing and I suddenly am living in the Caribbean. So this is a real divider for me. Don't you see that this is like dumb? I mean like it's an easy.

[Brian Greene]

When you say dumb, can you just be more precise? There are many criticisms of this picture, but I want to know which one you have in mind.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, the reason I think it's dumb is because it's like a pat solution, like you say, okay, since I can't get you free will the old way, what I'll do is I'll give you a lot of universes so you can have it all. You can have the chocolate universe, you can have the vanilla universe.

[Brian Greene]

A key thing is, A key thing is this proposal, which was put Forward in about 1957 by a guy named Hugh Everett, and then it was developed by many people, Bryce DeWitt and so on, was not put forward in order to restore anything to do with free will. These physicists, very, very high powered, creative physicists were studying quantum mechanics and they came to a puzzle. If quantum theory says there's a 30% chance you're gonna pick the vanilla ice cream and say a 30% chance that you're gonna pick the chocolate ice cream and say a 40% chance that you're gonna pick pistachio. And yet when we look at the world and we look at what you do, you seem to choose one or the other. Where do the other possibilities that quantum theory said could happen, where do they go? Do they just disappear? Did they?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, they disappear.

[Brian Greene]

Well, that is very hard to realize in the actual structure of quantum theory itself.

[Robert Krulwich]

You mean that physicists, when they order chocolate, do they then think, hmm, had I chosen vanilla, my whole life could have been disappeared?

[Brian Greene]

No, they don't think that. They say to themselves. At least the fellows that believe say, hmm, I chose vanilla in this world. But there's another version of me that's now eating chocolate.

[Chad Abumrad]

Huh.

[Robert Krulwich]

You guys are very weird.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, hello there.

[Robert Krulwich]

My, it's been a long time. Now, to be fair to Brian, at a quantum restaurant, at a kosher quantum restaurant, that's really quantum.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are there really such things?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, for the purpose of this argument, they will be. Waiters will deliver you, you closed lids of ice cream, and they won't tell you whether there's chocolate or vanilla. They're both in there. They'll say mysteriously, and you say, I think I'll have chocolate. Chocolate pops into existence and vanilla goes away. So that's why quantum scientists wonder where things went, because there's a mystery here. But that's another story. I'm sure your head is spinning. Yes, it is spinning.

[Jad Abumrad]

My head is spinning. Do you feel, it sometimes seems that Einstein was the point at which physics broke off away from common sense? Everything you've just told me is utterly fascinating and at the same time utterly confusing. How do you live your life knowing? Do you Compartmentalize everything that you study in this office.

[Michio Kaku]

Well, you know, late at night, I think about these things, and it gives you the willies. I do think about the fact that there's an alternate me out there, a clone of me, except I chose totally different life paths. And, yeah, I can write down the equations, the equations for these alternate universes where I exist in another universe, perhaps Elvis Presley is still alive. I get asked that question, is Elvis Presley alive in one of these universes? At that point, I have to stop.

[Chad Abumrad]

I have to stop.

[Jad Abumrad]

If this strikes you as a little too weird that there could be a bazillion out there in the world, in various universes, doing various things all at once, one of whom could be talking to me, but one of whom could be talking simultaneously to Elvis.

[Robert Krulwich]

One of them might be impersonating Elvis. Because, remember, in an infinite number of universes, you can do an infinite number of things.

[Jad Abumrad]

But we should keep in mind this is still just speculation. And as particle physicist Lisa Randall likes.

[Robert Krulwich]

To say, I mean, there's a big.

[Ben Adair]

Difference between physics and philosophy. You let that go away, you sort.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of lost the great thing that is.

[Ben Adair]

There in terms of physics, which is.

[Jad Abumrad]

The ability to actually make testable predictions about the world.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait a second. If she wants a testable prediction about the world, there have been experiments and real science experiments. I'm thinking of one that was done in 1960 and was repeated over and over since then, that examined free will and time in a very interesting way. And by the way, this experiment created an uproar, especially among philosophers, because it's of kind. It's kind of a doozy. It involves finger wiggling. So could I have a little mood music, please? The scientists invited a group of people to come to the lab and sit down and have their brains monitored. And then, according to the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, they turned to their subjects.

[Chad Abumrad]

And they said, and anytime you wish, wiggle your finger.

[Jad Abumrad]

That sounds easy enough.

[Robert Krulwich]

Remember, by the way, that to wiggle your finger takes two steps. First you have to decide to wiggle, then you wiggle. So you have to think it before you do it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which takes what, like a tenth of or a millionth of a second or something?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. A very short time. So you sit there and you think, okay, now I'm going to wiggle. However, when they did this experiment and they looked back at the graphs of all the brains of the people who.

[Chad Abumrad]

Did this, what they found was your sensation that you asked your finger to wiggle. Your sensation. You will. Came a Second after the brain kicked in.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you looked at my brain waves when I was wiggling my finger, Chad, here's what you'd see. First, you'd see my brain getting ready to wiggle. There's a spike or a blip, as Ramachandran would say. That's my brain getting ready. And then second, you'd get a second spike showing the wiggle. So there's a blip for getting ready. Yeah. And then there's a blip for wiggle. Now logic would tell you the way this should go is first I decide to wiggle, then my brain gets ready, and then my brain wiggles. Right. But when they looked, what actually happens is before I decide to wiggle, before my brain mysteriously is already getting ready.

[Chad Abumrad]

Even though you think you're willing the brain to do something, it's your brain that's willing you to will. It's thinking ahead of you. And then your so called thinking is a post hoc rationalization.

[Robert Krulwich]

So I don't have any free will?

[Chad Abumrad]

You don't have any free will. That was the implication that the philosophers came up with.

[Robert Krulwich]

But why can't you just say that the brain does a little bit of stuff before you're aware of it? It just always does. It just takes three quarters of a second to get going.

[Chad Abumrad]

This is fine for everything except the awareness of willing. Because will by its very nature is a feeling that you are doing it.

[Robert Krulwich]

So imagine, says Dr. Ramachandran, that you could. This hasn't happened yet, but you could see your brain waves in real time on a screen right in front of.

[Jad Abumrad]

You in real time.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yes. Now the question is, what's going to happen? Okay, I say, look, I want you to move your finger anytime you choose in the next three minutes.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you're sitting there, you know, thinking about nothing in particular. Wiggle.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa. I thought the wiggle was going to be just preceded by the blip, but it was like a whole second before that.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, your brain is way ahead of you on this thing. Let's just to listen to this again because it's a long pause wiggle.

[Chad Abumrad]

Then you say that blip is controlling me.

[Robert Krulwich]

Where the hell is free will?

[Chad Abumrad]

Even a simple thing like moving my finger, I can't do on my own without the blip telling me ahead of time. Either you're going to say the blip's controlling me, or you're going to say the blip has esp. But this gives you an experimental handle on something as elusive as free will.

[Robert Krulwich]

Time here betrays free will because your brain acted ahead of your decision to act. You have no idea who's acting. It's just one of those weird. I don't think they've ever resolved this either.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't know. Look, this. That's me very much in control of the pen in my hand, beating it on the table. I just did that.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

But if I were to put a graph in front of you, showing you your brain, and there was a piece of your brain that anticipated that, and then what would you say?

[Jad Abumrad]

I would say that they're wrong, I guess. I don't know.

[Robert Krulwich]

If we. Because we have to take a break now. If we wiggle our fingers. Goodbye. We would think that we were. We would think that it was our choice to wiggle. But the real question we should ask is who's wiggling? You're too, too wiggling.

[Jad Abumrad]

To Radiolab, This is Dale Richards in Kent, Ohio.

[Michio Kaku]

Radiolab 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

More information about Sloan@www.

[Rippling Finance Announcer]

Radiolab. Is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes. Now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism isn't naive, it's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Bertie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency and empathy and hope in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Krulwich]

You should tell the people who we.

[Marcus Lindeen]

Are and what our new show is.

[Chad Abumrad]

I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob.

[Robert Krulwich]

Goldstein, and we used to host a.

[Chad Abumrad]

Show called Planet Money.

[Robert Krulwich]

And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of.

[Chad Abumrad]

The worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies. Companies in the history of business.

[Robert Krulwich]

We struggled to come up with a.

[Chad Abumrad]

Name, Decided to call it business history. You know why?

[Jad Abumrad]

Why?

[Robert Krulwich]

Because it's a show about the history of business available everywhere you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chad here with Robert Crow, which Says Radiolab. We've been looking at the concept of time this hour, fighting against it, defying it, and denying it. Our last story, however, is about making peace with our place in the history of time. It comes to us from producer Ben Adair, and it unfolds in a very, very old place. The Mojave Desert.

[Ben Adair]

These are old mining roads. Once upon a time, hopeful men and women looked for outcroppings of quartz, iron, copper. And when they found them. This is public land administered by the Bureau of land Management, the BLM. They filed a claim and dug. Follow EP15 and you'll see the signs for the Burrow Schmidt Tunnel. Between the years 1906 and 1938, a lone miner dug and blasted a 2,087 foot hole straight through a granite mountain. His name was Burrough Schmidt, and he first filed this claim in 1904. Today, David Ayers digs here. He gets tours of Burroughs Tunnel. He says miners still roam these hills.

[Chad Abumrad]

And the way he got his name, Burl Schmidt, he always had two Burroughs with him, Jack and Jenny. And of course, once they died, Burl didn't waste anything, so he ate them. And burl died in 1954. They had his funeral right in front of the tunnel entrance. And in 1963, Tony and her husband came up. For the next 40 years, she was up here. And Tony died up here on her bed, inside her house, like she wanted to. At the age of 95. That old woman is legendary. She was scared of nothing. When she died up here, she didn't die alone. I was by her side. And her granddaughter from Vermont was here, too, and. But she never backed down from a fight. There was once, when she was 75, she had a fist fight with a guy right in front of her house. And she won the fight. She cheated, but she won the fight.

[Ben Adair]

What'd she do?

[Chad Abumrad]

She had a roll of nickels in her fist. But no, she never backed down from any fight.

[Ben Adair]

How long do you think you're gonna stay up here?

[Chad Abumrad]

I gotta be out the 29th of this month.

[Michio Kaku]

Really?

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah. The BLM's gonna take over the place and run it. They're gonna save Burroughs cabin, they're gonna save Tony's house over there. Everything else is gonna be bulldozed and cleared out, which is unfortunate, because they're gonna change the way history looks. This is basically the camp that an old woman built up. It's not supposed to be Disneyland. If you want Disneyland, that's in Anaheim.

[Ben Adair]

If you.

[Chad Abumrad]

If you want a desert camp, this is just the way some of them look.

[Ben Adair]

So this has been going on for a long time, this BLM stuff?

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah, quite a while, Tony. Since she lived here for so long, they didn't bother her. They just basically waited for her to die. She expected me to save the place, and I was. I promised her that she would die on her bed up here. Like, I kept that promise. The second promise I wasn't able to keep. But, you know, I tried. In fact, a lot of people tried.

[Ben Adair]

Y' all were really close, huh?

[Chad Abumrad]

Geez, I'm never gonna stop missing her.

[Robert Krulwich]

Never.

[Chad Abumrad]

You know, she was. There was no one else like her.

[Ben Adair]

David Ayers is gone now, but before he left, he looked over his ramshackle camp and told me, don't be sad. The days of the Desert rat have already passed. What's here is just a corpse. People who spend time in the Mojave start thinking differently about space. Huge stretches of land without a house, a telephone pole, or high tension wire. You can close your eyes while sliding between mountain ranges at 80 or 100 miles an hour. I'd love to drive Death Valley in a really fast car, a friend of mine said. A really, really fast car. Death Valley is probably the best known part of the Mojave Desert. Dropping down onto the valley floor from the west, you see huge salt flats below you. Reddish brown mountains peak in the distance, and between them, huge washes of boulder, rubble and sand flow into Death Valley like a dam bursting in extreme slow motion. It rains rarely in Death Valley. When I was there, a light drizzle caused a flash flood in Mosaic Canyon, where sculpted marble walls drop down hundreds of feet to a teeny, tiny stream bed. The stream fans out here, and Mosaic Canyon is a temple of reds and whites, arcing domes and voluptuous curves. There it sinks down deep into the rock, making hard stone look supple. Death Valley exists in geologic time. The oldest rocks at Badwater are 1.8 billion years old. Standing here watching the stream flow, I started thinking about that Mars rover. I thought about my girlfriend, my family, and politics. Mosaic Canyon sinks a tiny bit deeper each year. A hundred human empires will rise and fall in the time it takes Death Valley to notice our passing.

[Robert Krulwich]

The masquerade is a realm of illusion held once each year to serve as a vacation from ourselves, a relief from the reality of another year.

[Ben Adair]

Highway 190 bisects Death Valley east of the park. It ends in Death Valley Junction, a former ghost town revived 36 years ago when Marta Beckett reopened the Amargosa Opera House. This is the second season of her show the Masquerade.

[Robert Krulwich]

I always felt that I should be someone else other than me. I'm so bored with the role I play. I. I need to escape for a day.

[Ben Adair]

Marta Beckett is a dancer. She spent the first half of her life on stage in New York. In her early 40s, she found this abandoned theater. She patched the roof, painted an audience on the walls, sewed the curtains, the costumes, wrote the script, and choreographed the dance. Saturday nights sell out.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, they're like many musicals, if you want to call it the one we did before. This was called the Doll Maker, about a doll shop you can go and buy. The perfect companion for life, not have to bother with a real one. It was quite controversial. I made a few enemies out of it.

[Ben Adair]

Like the Doll Maker, the Masquerade asks questions about identity, who we want to be versus who we actually are. And it sort of summarizes why a lot of people move out to the desert. There's a freedom here in New York.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's like trying to paint on a canvas that's already painted on. Out here, it's an empty canvas for my mind to envision whatever I want to create. In the beginning, people thought I was kind of eccentric. Then they saw that I was a success, and that really snapped it. Now they like me. I'm not a weirdo.

[Ben Adair]

Do you ever hear from your friends back home?

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, yes. Yeah?

[Ben Adair]

What do they say?

[Robert Krulwich]

They think it's great. They thought I was crazy when I moved out here. Now they think it's great.

[Ben Adair]

Do they come visit you?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, once a year.

[Ben Adair]

Nobody really knows who was first, though. Anybody can tell you why. As city real estate spiraled out of control, artists, musicians, and old hippies have migrated here. The extreme south end of the Mojave Desert, tucked away around Pioneer Town, Joshua Tree, and Yucca Valley, are free spirits living off their art. Of course, the land grab is the cynic's point of view, and it's easy to feel jaded around young kids singing and old men drumming. Urban sophistication is when you refuse a stranger's hug or laugh, no questions asked. But those who've dropped their cynicism will tell you this is a place of optimism and hope that's genuine. The woman cooking brought extra burgers to share. The climbers are back with their instruments, looking for accompaniment. No experience necessary. The Indians sing because it feels good. You can feel good too, if you want. It's your choice.

[Chad Abumrad]

My name is Sonny two feathers. I'm 27 years old, and I'M from Cumsac, Saskatchewan, Canada.

[Ben Adair]

Describe for me what we're looking at right here and tell me how you see that versus maybe how other people see it.

[Chad Abumrad]

Well, right now, what I'm looking at is a beautiful desert paradise with boulders that have symbols of hands and symbols of people, of animals and spirits. See beautiful trees in front of me. Tall, reaching for the sky, reaching the prey up to the creator. And it looks all glimmering in the moonlight. When people are out here, all their stress and worries and their problems go away. Their anxieties, fear just totally leaves them when they come out here. But it's just so hard with this society now. We don't know how to escape this control that they have over us. But when we're here, the moment is just happy and everything blows away with.

[Robert Krulwich]

The wind Some was bad and some.

[Chad Abumrad]

Was good Some just did the best.

[Robert Krulwich]

They could Some have even tried to ease my trouble mind and I can't in hell but wonder Where I'm bound Where I'm bound.

[Ben Adair]

In 1989, a sculptor named Noah Purifoy bought a ranch on the flats north of Yucca. Val Purfoy is probably best known for founding the Watts Towers art Center in 1964. But he also made huge assemblage sculptures from lost and found desert objects. Some are serious, but most are whimsical. All are in pretty bad shape. His first few years out here, Purfoy fought the elements, but later he incorporated their effects. A sculpture is never done, he surmised. After he built it, the weather continued the process. I went out to talk to Purifoy, but I was a day late when I got there. I phoned his assistant, and she told me that he'd passed away the morning before. She was devastated. After hanging up, I walked around his garden. I wandered down a sculpture built like a hallway filled with old calculators, cash registers, posters, and boards with rusty nails sticking out. I stood there thinking about this man who had just died. And I started thinking about those old miners, their desert way of life. I thought about Marta Beckett singing her operas for 36 years. And I thought about Death Valley, the sense of time there that threatens to make everything we do here absolutely irrelevant. Everything. I thought about these sculptures decaying, the miners disappearing, all the artists dying, and every last one of us, the entire human race, turning to dust, blowing around the Mojave Desert in the wind. Noah Purifoy once said that after he finished his sculptures, they take on a life of their own. I'm gonna hope he's right about that. I really need to believe it's true.

[Chad Abumrad]

True.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ben Adair is a producer for KPCC radio and he has his own show out in California called Pacific Drift.

[Robert Krulwich]

And we would be very curious to hear what you think of our show. We have an email address radiolabnyc.org Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

Is one word and anything you heard you can hear [e-mail] I'm Chad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

And we are signing off. This is an English bracket clock.

[Robert Krulwich]

The carriage clocks are.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is late 1800s. This is a cuckoo clock and it will cuckoo and then play a little song for you. This program was produced by Jad Amrad and Ellen Horn.

[Robert Krulwich]

Production support by Robert Curlwich, Sally Hership.

[Jad Abumrad]

Rob Krieger, David Martin, Amy o', Leary, Sarah Pellegrini, Valken Unsal, Michael Shelley and Ann Hepperman. Special thanks to Keith Scott, Ramsey Allen, Valerie Shakespeare and I'm Cindy Finelli of Finelli Antique Timepieces. Time can be expensive.

[Robert Krulwich]

The most valuable time is the time.

[Jad Abumrad]

We spend on each other.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water?

Tide is specifically designed to fight any.

Stain you throw at it. Even in cold butter.

Yep.

Chocolate ice cream. Sure thing. Barbecue sauce. Tide's got you covered.

[Chad Abumrad]

You don't need to use warm water.

[Robert Krulwich]

Additionally, Tide pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new coldzyme technology.

Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be tied.

[Jad Abumrad]

Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.