Time

Summary

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Radiolab: "Time"

Podcast: Radiolab (WNYC Studios)
Episode Date: May 29, 2007
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Guests & Voices: Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Brian Greene, Jay Griffiths, Tony Schwartz, athletes, and others

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Episode Overview

Radiolab’s “Time” dives into how we perceive, measure, and experience time – from the deeply personal to the cosmic, from ancient natural clocks to the precise instruments of science, and from the clocks in our homes to the relative time experienced in our bodies, societies, and even nations. Through stories, sound experiments, and interviews with neurologists, physicists, and artists, the episode explores the plasticity, mystery, and politics of time.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Music as a Metaphor for Time

• Opening Experiment: Jad plays Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, digitally stretched from 60 minutes to 24 hours, illustrating how altering the beat changes our perception and reveals hidden layers in familiar forms ([01:48]).
  • “The slowness unlocks something in the original…change the routine, you make new discoveries.” – Jad Abumrad ([02:28])
• The program promises to analyze time "so closely" that new discoveries will emerge about its nature.

2. Personal Memory and “Plastic Time”

• Oliver Sacks’ Story: Sacks recounts recalling years of his life while driving, noting how vivid years (like when important life events occurred) seemed longer; recent, less eventful years felt shorter ([04:37]-[06:19]).
  • “The most recent years…did not, apparently, have such detailed memories…and they seem subjectively shorter.” – Oliver Sacks ([06:13])
  • Robert calls time “swollen and rich some of the time, flaccid…other times.” ([06:19])

3. Experiments with Compressing and Expanding Time

• Childhood Time-Lapse: Sacks describes photographing ferns unfurling, compressing days into seconds with a flip-book, fascinated by “the compression of time photographically” ([07:10]-[08:04]).
• “Parent Clock”: Tony Schwartz’s audio time-lapse of his niece growing up compresses 12 years of life into 2 minutes, demonstrating the emotional weight of time’s passage ([08:04]-[10:43]).
  • Robert notes: “What you’ve just heard is a parent clock…a kid gets older, you must be getting older too.” ([10:45])
• Jad: “Everything is a clock, I guess.” ([11:09])

4. The Rise and Rule of Clock Time

• From “Task Time” to “Clock Time”: In the 19th century, communities had many local times—until railroads required standardization ([11:47]-[14:49]).
  • “There was no official time in Sandusky…only clocks.” – Robert Krulwich ([13:10])
  • Railroads imposed a standardized time, leading to conflict and “time wars” ([15:06]).
• The Politics of Time: This standardization is linked back to power and, later, empire ([48:36]).

5. Technology, Time, and Movies

• Muybridge and Motion: The photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, spurred by a bet to capture a galloping horse’s feet off the ground, led to motion photography and the birth of movies ([16:12]-[19:55]).
  • “The camera unlocks a secret. It lets us see something you could never see before, because this camera, essentially, it stops time.” – Robert ([18:42])
• The pace of life and work itself was accelerated by film technology, which enabled efficiency studies and, paradoxically, enabled leisure via movies ([20:11]-[20:41]).

6. Natural and Cultural Clocks

• Clocks Without Numbers: Jay Griffiths and Rebecca Solnit discuss non-mechanical time-telling:
  • Spice clocks (taste the hour at night) ([21:21]),
  • Bird clocks (call of birds to signal time among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea) ([22:06]),
  • Flower clocks (Carl Linnaeus’s botanical timepiece, flowers bloom to mark hours) ([23:06]).
  • Scent calendars (Andaman Islanders mark months by the scent of flowers/fruit) ([23:38]-[24:23]).
  • “Time is everywhere in nature…for most of history, time has been absolutely embedded in nature in some beautiful ways.” – Rebecca Solnit ([24:18])

7. What Is Time? Science & Relativity

• Brian Greene: Physics defines time as “that which allows us to see change,” but Einstein’s relativity teaches that time is not universal ([25:47]-[27:38]).
• Thought Experiment: Turbocharged jetpacks, synchronized watches, and how high-speed travel makes personal time elapse differently ([27:38]-[29:48]).
  • “Time itself is not some universal concept. Time is held by the individual, by the observer.” – Jad ([29:24])
• “Relativity says that time and speed are mysteriously coupled so that when I go fast, my time goes slow.” – Robert ([29:48])

8. The Human Experience of Time: Neurology & Sports

• Different Human Tempos: Oliver Sacks recounts patients whose sense of time was drastically altered:
  • Myron V.: A single gesture (wiping his nose) took two hours, but seemed normal to him ([34:52]-[37:30]).
  • Hester Y.: Moved and reacted at extreme speed, much faster than others, yet she was unaware ([38:10]-[40:21]).
  • “She was no more conscious of her speed than Myron was of his slowness.” – Oliver Sacks ([40:11])
• Being “In The Zone”: High-performing athletes describe how, during peak performance, time slows and their senses become heightened ([41:44]-[46:12]).
  • “It’s almost like everything is moving in slow motion…you’re watching birds kind of slowly fly by and you hear a song just whistling in your ear.” – Unnamed athlete ([44:39])

9. Time as Power & Politics

• Empires of Time: Rebecca Solnit and Jay Griffiths discuss how control of calendars and clocks is a form of political power—from British-imposed Greenwich Mean Time to Turkmenistan’s president renaming months after himself and his mother ([48:36]-[51:25]).
  • “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.” – Rebecca Solnit ([50:24])
  • Dictators (e.g., Pol Pot starting “year zero”) rewrite time to claim authority ([51:00])

10. Transcending Time

• Ecstasy and Eternity: Jay Griffiths reflects on losing one’s sense of time in love, prayer, art ([51:42]-[52:34]).
  • “All you have to have done is loved somebody…that half an hour has lasted an eternity.” ([52:14])
  • “That’s when the moment meets the eternal…just this moment that you hold in your hand.” – Jay ([52:21])

11. Returning to Beethoven and the Nature of Time

• The Stretched Symphony: The episode closes with sounds and reflections from a 24-hour performance of Beethoven’s 9th, where listeners experienced time as something vast and transformed—sometimes “buzzed,” sometimes feeling “lifted up” ([53:02]-[57:47]).

  • “It’s like an ecstatic apocalypse…just a constant lift, lifting, lifting.” – Rebecca Solnit ([57:31])

• Jad reflects on how perception of time might differ among animals—hummingbirds, whales, turtles—suggesting our experience is just one slice of the temporal spectrum ([56:26]-[57:20]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• Music and Perception:
  • “Maybe it was there all along and we couldn’t hear it. But play with the meter…and the music has a different story to tell.” – Jad Abumrad ([01:48])
• Time’s Emotional Texture:
  • “For a parent, a kid gets older, you must be getting older too…This is how the whole world works.” – Robert Krulwich ([10:45])
• Historic Clocks and Resistance:
  • “Who owns noon in Sandusky? Sandusky Railroad.” – Robert Krulwich (mock debate, [14:49])
• Photography’s Impact:
  • “The camera…lets us see something you could never see before, because this camera, essentially, it stops time.” – Robert Krulwich ([18:42])
• Nature’s Clocks:
  • “The Kaluli people…have what they call a clock of birds.” – Rebecca Solnit ([22:06])
• Physics of Time:
  • “Time itself is not some universal concept. Time is held by the individual, by the observer.” – Jad Abumrad ([29:24])
  • “This is like one of the great conundrums…what you know and what you feel are so different.” – Robert Krulwich ([31:26])
• Neurology and Extremes:
  • “He said he was just wiping his nose…this movement…was taking about two hours.” – Oliver Sacks ([36:07])
  • “She was no more conscious of her speed than Myron was of his slowness.” – Oliver Sacks ([40:11])
• Athletic “Time”:
  • “It’s almost like everything is moving in slow motion…you hear a song just whistling in your ear.” – Track Athlete ([44:39])
• Empires and Power:
  • “Empires are…to do with land. What I’m arguing is that actually there have been empires of time.” – Rebecca Solnit ([50:24])
• Transcending Time:
  • “All you have to have done is loved somebody…that half an hour has lasted an eternity.” – Jay Griffiths ([52:14])
• Beethoven’s Time:
  • “It’s like an ecstatic apocalypse…the other thing I felt when I came in and continued to feel I was being lifted up. Just a constant lift, lifting, lifting.” – Rebecca Solnit ([57:31])

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Important Timestamps

• Beethoven’s stretched 9th as intro: [01:48]
• Oliver Sacks on memory and time: [04:37]-[06:19]
• Tony Schwartz’s “Nancy grows up”: [08:04]-[10:43]
• The advent of clock time via railroads: [11:38]-[15:23]
• Muybridge and motion photography: [16:12]-[20:41]
• Natural clocks—spice, birds, flowers: [21:20]-[24:23]
• Brian Greene explains relativity of time: [25:47]-[33:10]
• Oliver Sacks: Patients with extreme slow/fast time: [34:52]-[41:00]
• Athletes in “the zone”: [41:44]-[46:12]
• Empires of time, Greenwich, Turkmenistan: [48:36]-[51:28]
• Ecstatic, timeless states: [51:42]-[52:34]
• Stretching Beethoven, human and animal time: [53:00]-[57:47]

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Episode Tone & Style

Radiolab’s tone is inquisitive, playful, and contemplative. The hosts and guests muse, riff, and experiment in real time, using sound, story, and humor to make science and philosophy vivid and visceral.

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Conclusion

“Time” by Radiolab is a sweeping, ear-opening journey. It asks not just what time is, but how we live inside its many forms: measured or mystical, personal or public, fast or slow, clocked or felt. Whether through the inner lives of patients, the silent sway of flowers, the rush of an athlete, or the politics of empires, the episode reveals that time is far from an absolute, but rather a shifting, deeply human experience.

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Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Rebecca Solnit]

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[Robert Krulwich]

Huh, that sounds easier than I thought.

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Oliver Sacks]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Robert Krulwich]

Listener supported wnyc studios.

[Rebecca Solnit]

You're listening to radio on new york.

[Jad Abumrad]

Public radio public radio wny. 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 24 hours. And if you sit for 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 along and we couldn't hear it. But play with the meter. Music is mostly about meter, after all, and the music has a different story to tell. A secret, perhaps, locked up inside the routine. Change the routine, you make new discoveries. That's what we'll do this hour. We'll look at time so closely, we'll discover new things about It. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. 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?

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm very well. I like this bathing in Beethoven thing you've got going on here.

[Rebecca Solnit]

It's cool, right?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. Actually, at the end of the program, we will be dropping in on a performance that happened recently in San Francisco where people listened to it over the course of an entire day. A day? A day. So where.

[Robert Krulwich]

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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure. The man who mistook his wife for a hat. And awakenings.

[Robert Krulwich]

So I was over at his house. This is me actually over at his.

[Jad Abumrad]

House right now, key turning.

[Robert Krulwich]

And he told me this story.

[Oliver Sacks]

I don't know whether 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 with. 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?

[Robert Krulwich]

How long did 72 take? Did you get to Montreal or were you still.

[Oliver Sacks]

No, 72 probably took about half an hour. Well, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

So time, I guess we all know this, is a very plastic thing. It's swollen and rich some of the time, and it's like flaccid and eh. 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.

[Oliver Sacks]

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 darkroom 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 curled up fiddleheads or croziers 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 brrr. 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. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Us two. If Oliver Sacks can 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 sped up for your appreciation is Nancy Schwartz. From birth to age 12, in 2 minutes 12 seconds exactly.

[Oliver Sacks]

Jack and Jill.

[Jad Abumrad]

Went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke down and Jill came tumbling. Happy birthday, Daddy, Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. If you call the toy store up.

[Rebecca Solnit]

And you say, I want a puppy.

[Jad Abumrad]

And a whistle and a horn and.

[Oliver Sacks]

A hat and a dress and a.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ballerina costume, that's what you get. But when Santa Claus can't bring you, you can't cry.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Tony.

[Robert Krulwich]

If the dog makes Willie in the house, if he.

[Rebecca Solnit]

If you have to make him a house, broken. If he makes Willie in the apartment.

[Jad Abumrad]

You have to slap him with a newspaper.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Then if he doesn't do it again, he's half's broken.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you think of the Russian sending the dog up in the satellite?

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 someplace. And I'm doing a report on Hawaii. And we're taking notes and doing research. This summer we're going camping. And 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's sleepaway camp. It's all girls. You'll miss my hair. And it's very special for tonight.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's just the way I want it.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 and that's great. And I've been working on the school newspaper. I might be edited next year. And I've been discovering boys.

[Robert Krulwich]

You know what that is?

[Jad Abumrad]

What's that?

[Robert Krulwich]

That is, if you were a parent, what you've just heard is a parent clock.

[Jad Abumrad]

A parent clock. That's kind of cool.

[Robert Krulwich]

Because a 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

I think everything is a clock, I guess.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

By the way, that was Nancy Grows up and the audio flip recorded and arranged by the great radio producer Tony Schwartz. Thanks to him and to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and Also to you, Mr. Robert Crowwich, 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 a parent clock, you've got other kinds of time. You know, like personal time, getting out of bed time, going to sleep time.

[Robert Krulwich]

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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Task times. How do we get from task and personal time to clock time?

[Robert Krulwich]

Ah, now that's interesting. Let's go back to the 1800s and imagine a guy. We'll call him, oh, Zoltan Treboygan. Zoltan Trebon, living in Sandusky, Ohio. And suppose Zoltan wants to know, you know, what time it is? Okay, so if Zoltan walked into, say, Bixby's tavern and asked, Mr. Bigspeed, 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 wondered if you could show me the time. Three minutes past the Alps. 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. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh? What do you mean there's no official time in Sandusky?

[Robert Krulwich]

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 4 minutes or 10 minutes different in Sandusky in the 1850s, who cares? Until the railroad changed everything. Once the railroad came in, if Zoltan wanted to take, I don't know, how.

[Jad Abumrad]

About the 303 to Cleveland?

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, if he wanted to take the 303 to Cleveland, how would he know when it was 3:03?

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, I see where you're going with this.

[Robert Krulwich]

If he went by the bank's clock, he'd arrive a half hour ahead of time. If he went by the hotel clock, he'd arrive in the nick of time. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Makes sense.

[Robert Krulwich]

And because the railroads were so important, I mean, the tavern would have to get its beer deliveries from the railroad.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it gradually railroad time becomes everybody's time.

[Jad Abumrad]

So what happened to local time?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, local time disappeared.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Really?

[Robert Krulwich]

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 it's noon would be 20 minutes later so that it could fit into the railroad schedule.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, so they moved noon over 20 minutes?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. And there were protests about this.

[Oliver Sacks]

I put it to you, ladies and.

[Robert Krulwich]

Gentlemen, who owns noon in Sandusky? Sandusky Railroad.

[Jad Abumrad]

So in all seriousness, people fought against this. They rebelled against the railroads.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh. There were time wars in certain towns where part of the town would go to railroad time, but the other part would determinately stick with what used to be local time. And they'd have different times in the town.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. It's almost like it was a personal freedom machine.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. Cause 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 referenced. When 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Every, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Carlo, lots of time.

[Jad Abumrad]

There's an interesting connection to explore here, and it has to do with horses.

[Robert Krulwich]

Horses?

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Stanford University, right.

[Jad Abumrad]

He was really into speed and he owned a really fast horse. And the horse's name was Occident.

[Robert Krulwich]

Occident, I remember that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Story goes, this horse was the subject of a gentleman's bet.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Well, there was no gentleman's bet. It's a myth. Stanford, so far as we know, was not a betting man.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Rebecca Solnit]

It was an argument. There's no evidence that there was money on it.

[Jad Abumrad]

In any case, this argument among Stanford and his railroad buddies centered around the following. When a horse gallops, do all four of its feet leave the ground at once? What do you think?

[Robert Krulwich]

I don't know. It's not a question I would frankly ever ask anyone, but.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, at the time, it was a big question because they had no way of knowing because horses moved faster than eyeballs could see.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 Muybridge as the photographer to capture this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Along comes Edward Muybridge, 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 solve the bet. Here's the problem. Cameras in those days were very slow.

[Rebecca Solnit]

A fast exposure would be maybe a second or several seconds. Muybridge was going to push photography to suddenly be able to capture motion in a 500th of a second. Otherwise you just got blur.

[Jad Abumrad]

Blur. Imagine that first step out of the world of the blur. Muybridge 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 gallop, steals him right out of the flow of time. Except Muybridge doesn't just take one photo, he takes 24. See, he'd 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.

[Oliver Sacks]

So what did they see?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, the pictures formed a series of a horse running. And some of those photos showed oxygen. Yes. With all four feet off the ground.

[Robert Krulwich]

So the camera here unlocks a secret. It lets us see something you could never see before, because this camera, essentially, it stops time.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exactly. Meanwhile, says Rebecca, Muybridge became fascinated with learning more secrets of time, secrets locked inside basic human movements.

[Rebecca Solnit]

A leap, a splash, a walk, a pirouette.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow, how mundane.

[Rebecca Solnit]

But they're so enchanted when you really pay attention to them. Muybridge 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 pitchers of water, pour water into glasses, splash water out of basins, bathe in water, and you can see all these droplets frozen in midair.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. Anyhow, take all those frozen moments, align them one after the other, and play them back, and you've got flow again, albeit artificial flow, which we call movies.

[Robert Krulwich]

Movies are good.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 movies.

[Robert Krulwich]

What does that mean? What do you mean by that?

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

So if I were pushing the lever maybe too slowly, is this how right.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

All the scientific devices of chronology are machines manufacturing time, the tool that in our hands means victory. And our hands must be as relentless.

[Robert Krulwich]

As the hands of our clock. Or there's a whole nother 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 Jay Griffiths 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.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Cool clocks.

[Robert Krulwich]

First of all, there's a spice clock.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Yes. We're used to clocks which you can see when it's really dark and it's, you know, you can see that you've just woken up at 2:35, and you really didn't want to wake up at 2:35. 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 night. So there would be maybe kind of, you know, cinnamon for about 1 o' clock and turmeric for 2 o'. Clock.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you're sitting there in bed and you sniff the thyme, or you could taste it. How about the clock of birds? This is the Kaluli people.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 fryer bird and the hooded butchbird, when they sing in the mornings, the children are taught to understand that that's a signal to get up and leave and 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 in 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, how about it's 1751, and Carl Linnaeus, famous categorizer of everything.

[Oliver Sacks]

Yes.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Made a sweet Sweden a flower clock.

[Robert Krulwich]

What did he make?

[Rebecca Solnit]

A flower clock so that you could see by the blooming of different flowers what time it was.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's, by the way, very, very good gardening to be able to do that.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 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 in 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 impressive, embedded in nature in some beautiful ways.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll hear more from author Jay Griffith later in the program. Thanks, Robert.

[Robert Krulwich]

Thank you.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krubich and I will be back in a moment.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Public Radio W.

[Oliver Sacks]

This is Matt Bushko.

[Jad Abumrad]

And Alyssa Oldcrow in Gainesville, Florida.

[Oliver Sacks]

And Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the.

[Robert Krulwich]

Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding.

[Oliver Sacks]

Of science and technology in the modern world.

[Jad Abumrad]

More information about [e-mail]. I'm Jad Abumra. This is Radiolab. 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 Crowicz, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Ooh, I'm counting 20 minutes exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 that?

[Robert Krulwich]

That's actually a pretty tough question. What is time? Essentially, I have a neighbor, Brian Greene, who's a 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

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 is changing positions just as he says. Now 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 would. I still in my bones believe that, that somewhere there's a clock ticking that says what a second is.

[Robert Krulwich]

And that's the same in Mars and in. Yeah, right. Everybody thinks that because it's so sensible that time is universally the same for everyone. Now, here's the big secret. Apparently that's not true. Time is not universal. And this, says Brian, is part of Einstein's theory of relativity.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, you.

[Oliver Sacks]

Don'T own a watch today.

[Jad Abumrad]

I never have owned a watch.

[Robert Krulwich]

Is that right? You've never owned a watch?

[Jad Abumrad]

Never owned a watch and never liked the idea of a timepiece sort 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which suggests that the subject, and if you will, I would be the subject.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chad, by all means.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 got over there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sure. Here is A jetpack. Turbocharged jetpack. Put it on back. Yeah. Okay, now take these rollerblades. Oh.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now put one foot, right foot.

[Robert Krulwich]

And on your left. On the left.

[Jad Abumrad]

Jake, set the target speed dial on your jetpack to 669 million miles an hour.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's a little fast. 669 million miles an hour.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. What time does your watch say?

[Robert Krulwich]

5 24.

[Jad Abumrad]

So does mine. We're synchronized now.

[Robert Krulwich]

Exactly synchronized.

[Jad Abumrad]

When it gets to 5:25 in 3, 2, 1, push the red button.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hitting the red button.

[Oliver Sacks]

And.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is where we left. I have left the planet Earth. And I see a galaxy going by on this side. I see another one coming up over there. Another galaxy going by there. Now, by the way, my watch is absolutely quite perfectly. I'm having a lovely time.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm just.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 bracing. Now, Robert. Yes?

[Jad Abumrad]

Look at your watch.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

What time does it say?

[Robert Krulwich]

It says 5:26. What time's it on your watch?

[Jad Abumrad]

5:33.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's a seven minute difference. Is your watch broken? Because my watch.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, no, no, no, no. Time for you is different than time for me.

[Robert Krulwich]

You mean literally?

[Jad Abumrad]

Literally. It's not that my watch somehow was shooken 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

So relativity says that time and speed are mysteriously coupled so that when I go fast, my time goes slow.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which explains why our watchers don't agree.

[Robert Krulwich]

Exactly.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Robert Krulwich]

If I looked at my watch, everything was perfectly normal to me. My clock was ticking perfectly normal for me.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, so is mine in Central Park. So what gives?

[Robert Krulwich]

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. Not only would my watch be ticking slower for you, everything about me would be behaving slow.

[Jad Abumrad]

To you. So what do you do with this information?

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, physics teaches us that if I'm, say, running down the street, my time is ticking infinitesimally. Slower than that guy's time over there.

[Robert Krulwich]

Why?

[Jad Abumrad]

Because he's standing still. Oh, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

And you're running.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you're in different time capsules. Kind of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Apparently so. And I know this is what science tells me, but my common sense tells me that that is completely wrong. Nothing in my experience tells me this is the case.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 where 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, I learned 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you're hitting Times Square and you're wandering through. You think, oh, boy, I am really changing the universe of all these other people.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, I really consider it totally personal. So I'm not changing their time. I'm changing the rate at which time elapses for me. So I have power.

[Robert Krulwich]

So when you run to catch a bus, you think, hey, I gotta get on this bus. Also, I'm slowing down time for myself.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 repelling 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do you share this with others?

[Jad Abumrad]

Rarely. You're listening to radio on new york public radio. Public radio w n y c. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. We're talking about time today. And here with me to help me do that is Robert Crowicz. ABC News and blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is my specialty.

[Jad Abumrad]

Witches are. From Brian Greene, Physicists 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, and he's going so slow, and then you see a hummingbird whiz by? Phew. Clearly they're moving at different tempos, but perhaps they're also experiencing entirely different universes of time. Do you ever wonder about that?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, 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.

[Oliver Sacks]

Of the day, Myron would be apparently motionless, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, but little balletic poses, hand in the air, but just stuck. Stuck in space.

[Oliver Sacks]

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. I said, you're joking, putting me on. And he said, I'm not. And 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 now.

[Robert Krulwich]

He said he was just. What? He was just wiping his nose.

[Oliver Sacks]

He said, I was just wiping my nose.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, now, that's something that takes me about two seconds roughly.

[Oliver Sacks]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Of still Myron with his arms gently.

[Oliver Sacks]

Going up, of apparently still Myron.

[Robert Krulwich]

How many photographs did you have?

[Oliver Sacks]

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 as 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did you ever show Myron the pictures that you had made?

[Oliver Sacks]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then did you say, so, Myron, look at this. It took you two hours to do this, and if you did that, then what did he say?

[Oliver Sacks]

He was astonished, and that's too mild a word. He was thunderstruck.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. So Myron had no idea that he was experiencing the world slower than the rest. The of.

[Robert Krulwich]

Not until Oliver stapled all the pictures into a flip book and goes. Then 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 that he likes to talk about. Her name is Hester Y. Hester.

[Oliver Sacks]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

What does that mean? They play catch?

[Oliver Sacks]

Yeah, they would play catch. I'm sorry, is that the wrong word? Play ball.

[Robert Krulwich]

Play catch.

[Oliver Sacks]

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 Parkinson's, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Oliver Sacks]

Just.

[Robert Krulwich]

So how many times faster is Hester moving than the student?

[Oliver Sacks]

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 10, pause before you throw the ball back? Count up to 10.

[Robert Krulwich]

She's still in her very speedy mode.

[Oliver Sacks]

And she'll say, okay, okay. And the ball, ball would come back scarcely slower. And I would say, I asked you to count up to 10. And in a voice which I really can't imitate, but this is the crushed voice. The technical term is tachyphenia, that is speech. And the crushed voice of extreme Parkinsonism, she would say, I can't speak quick enough for that.

[Robert Krulwich]

In her brain, was she thinking that she was giving normal speech?

[Oliver Sacks]

Yeah, she was no more conscious of her speed than Marin was of his slowness.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 go?

[Robert Krulwich]

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 there we are.

[Jad Abumrad]

What about the rest of us? What kind of range is available to you or I?

[Oliver Sacks]

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 seemed to come to them more slowly and they could see the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Seams on the ball in the zone. Robert, I just so happen to have something here which is a perfect illustration of what he's talking about.

[Robert Krulwich]

Uh huh.

[Jad Abumrad]

Except it's not baseball. It has to do with track.

[Robert Krulwich]

Track's good.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here's the short excerpt.

[Rebecca Solnit]

When I'm up, they call my name.

[Oliver Sacks]

I step up on the Runway.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Usually it's just.

[Jad Abumrad]

Relax, you are the best plant.

[Rebecca Solnit]

And I don't think anything else after that.

[Jad Abumrad]

I want that adrenaline coming when he says, runners, take the mark. Because I only got 10 seconds after nine seconds at that point, you know.

[Robert Krulwich]

But if it's pumping, pumping, pumping, pumping.

[Oliver Sacks]

Then they say, take your mark.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Oliver Sacks]

Temperature's 52 degrees, 52 degrees out here.

[Jad Abumrad]

My body's warmed up, sitting in the blogs and, like, the cold ain't even. It ain't even phasing 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

And if you're not ready, it doesn't.

[Jad Abumrad]

Matter at this point, because you have to be ready. And when he says, set, set. Sitting there thinking, this gun go off.

[Oliver Sacks]

Leave him.

[Jad Abumrad]

Give it all you got.

[Oliver Sacks]

Just.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just take it out from the gun.

[Jad Abumrad]

And just hold on. You go feel the strength out there. You ain't gonna slow down. No fatigue or nothing gonna come over. Whoever's in the lanes behind me, they go get it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just listening.

[Oliver Sacks]

Get in tune, get in tune.

[Jad Abumrad]

Listen to the whole hush show of the crowd as they get quiet 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.

[Oliver Sacks]

It's almost like there's a firing pin.

[Jad Abumrad]

Smacking me in my butt and pushing me.

[Oliver Sacks]

So it's not that I sound out everything around me.

[Jad Abumrad]

I've already sounded out everything because I'm the bullet, and it's only me in the chamber.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of what you think you've heard, because.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you do that, you just lost a race. You have to be one with the gun.

[Jad Abumrad]

And when he says, set, I just.

[Robert Krulwich]

Breathe all the air in.

[Jad Abumrad]

I take a deep inhale. Take one last look at 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Sweep, sweep, sweep, drive, drive, drive. Pick him up, pick him up, pick him up. I let all the air out, and.

[Jad Abumrad]

That'S when I start running as fast as. As I can. When you're running and you're so relaxed.

[Oliver Sacks]

In what you're doing to where a.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 that hear song just whistling in your ear.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 given 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 an eternity.

[Jad Abumrad]

Come off the turn, I'm in the front, I'm in the front, know they coming for me. They stopping me like Cheeto.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm in the front.

[Jad Abumrad]

So I'm just thinking, just get away, just get away, just get away.

[Robert Krulwich]

Turn on the afterburn.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hold on, hold on. Just stretch it out, Start going, Get to the top of the curb.

[Robert Krulwich]

Turn on the afterburn.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hold on, hold on.

[Robert Krulwich]

Powering down, powering down like a train.

[Jad Abumrad]

See him come up beside me at the peripheral. You gotta hold on.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is always happening.

[Jad Abumrad]

They trying to get you at the.

[Robert Krulwich]

End, but you can fight him off.

[Jad Abumrad]

You can fight them off at the end. It's just compete, compete, compete. And then lean at the tape. Go ahead, reach and go.

[Oliver Sacks]

Reach and go.

[Jad Abumrad]

Reach and go.

[Robert Krulwich]

Pump them on, pump them on, baby. Pump them all. Get across the line. Just smile out, smile.

[Jad Abumrad]

And we get down to, to take. But that's. That's kind of stuff I live for. I live for those intense moments like that right there.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's hard to accept the fact sometimes that you are human, but it's true.

[Jad Abumrad]

And I've had a heart surgery in year 2000. But as athletes, and you can ask.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 accomplishing our goal, because we have to believe.

[Jad Abumrad]

We have to confuse ourselves into believing that no matter what's wrong with you.

[Robert Krulwich]

Or what you're dealing with, it's not going to be a factor to what you're trying to accomplish.

[Jad Abumrad]

We believe we're invincible. Thanks to the next big thing and sound artist Ben Rubin for that, a piece he produced for the National Track and Field hall of Fame. You can visit them on the [e-mail]. so, Robert, what do you think?

[Robert Krulwich]

This is a case, I think, of athletes showing you how we contest with time, get power by mastering time, shaving it slightly.

[Jad Abumrad]

Time and power have a long history. That's what we'll look at shortly. I'm Jad Abumran. Robert Krulwich and I will be back in a moment. You're listening to your listening to Radio Lab. Hi, I'm Bill Schiller from Oak Harbor, Washington. Radiolab is supported in part by the.

[Robert Krulwich]

National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. My guest today is Robert Krulwich, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Speaking of which, my interview with Remember Jay Griffith, whom 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.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

What was that?

[Rebecca Solnit]

That was the manifesto of British anti road protests in the mid-90s.

[Robert Krulwich]

The British Anti road protesters?

[Rebecca Solnit]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

They were people who don't like roads.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 recognize Greenwich Mean Time.

[Robert Krulwich]

3 hours 24 minutes.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Time is a highly political subject. It initially was the British sense of time which was transported all over the world. Britons 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

The real time was in London.

[Rebecca Solnit]

The real time in London that's true.

[Robert Krulwich]

Of course, is the British don't own the seas anymore, but we all still use Greenwich Mean Time, so.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 Turkmembashi, and the month of April is called Gurben Sultan. Why are they called that?

[Rebecca Solnit]

Well, he named one after himself and one after his mother.

[Robert Krulwich]

You read everybody there in January calls it, you know, President of our country month.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Pol Pot says, all right, everything starts with me. Is that what that means?

[Rebecca Solnit]

Exactly. Everything starts with me now when I say it does. This is year zero.

[Robert Krulwich]

And to you, I guess, the joy of time, the deepest, most ecstatic version of it, is when you lose it completely.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Time standing still in a moment like that is like a really swollen now.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Yes, exactly, exactly. And that in a sense, you know, that's when the moment meets the eternal. That that is all that matters is just this moment that you hold in your hand.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks Robert, that was great.

[Robert Krulwich]

Thank you.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

24 hours, yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 1:02 in the morning and went all night.

[Rebecca Solnit]

So it's about 3:45 in the morning, 3:55 in the morning.

[Jad Abumrad]

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. But you know, here it's like, even.

[Oliver Sacks]

Though it's like a very simple thing.

[Jad Abumrad]

To do, to say, okay, it's not.

[Oliver Sacks]

Going to be 90 minutes, it's going to be a day, it still gives.

[Jad Abumrad]

You that sense of floating 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.

[Oliver Sacks]

It evokes that somehow.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know how people report that, you.

[Robert Krulwich]

Know, your life flashes before your eyes.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 9th Symphony on like on your.

[Robert Krulwich]

Car stereo while you were going into.

[Jad Abumrad]

Some car crash or something? Would it slow down and sound like this?

[Robert Krulwich]

The idea was to stretch something to.

[Jad Abumrad]

24 hours by stretching Beethoven's 9th. I don't only stretch a piece of music. I stretch music history.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Oh God, Beethoven for 24 hours.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm just wondering if Beethoven is slowly spinning in his grave.

[Robert Krulwich]

Leifinge, that's my name. Here in San Francisco this weekend, this is the second full 24 hour performance.

[Jad Abumrad]

Upstairs, where the performance is going on has a good vibe. Everything, everything seems very gentle. The floor is completely covered with beanbags or pillows.

[Rebecca Solnit]

The space has really amazing acoustics.

[Jad Abumrad]

The 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.

[Rebecca Solnit]

I want to see how I feel being exposed to one unique piece.

[Jad Abumrad]

The first response was a very calming response. And then when I walked in and then I came in, I. It was overwhelming.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Open up and expand.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everything we do must almost be in Slow motion.

[Jad Abumrad]

To something that can just deal with things that quickly. And to a whale or some huge animal with a heart rate that is like once every few minutes. We must seem really fast.

[Oliver Sacks]

This piece is kind of like that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Suddenly I felt like I was moving.

[Robert Krulwich]

At hummingbird speed and then it stretched out.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's getting this funny way. It's growing and growing and growing and.

[Rebecca Solnit]

You'Re just wanting it to grow.

[Robert Krulwich]

And.

[Rebecca Solnit]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our little small human time, it doesn't feel like it's climaxing.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's true.

[Jad Abumrad]

It doesn't really climax.

[Rebecca Solnit]

The climax never happens.

[Jad Abumrad]

The denim one ever comes. It's like euphoria right now.

[Rebecca Solnit]

I don't know, maybe somebody else ran out screaming. You have to be.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm really buzzed.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Is serious. Oh, it's like an ecstatic apocalypse. The other thing I felt when I came in and continued to feel I was being lifted up. Just a constant lift, lifting, lifting.

[Jad Abumrad]

There was no ending there.

[Rebecca Solnit]

Just a constant lift, lifting, lifting.

[Jad Abumrad]

It just got quiet. It sounded like it was supposed to go quiet there. Yeah, it'll be a stretched out quiet. Yeah, it's probably just like a rest. Yeah, but it'll be however many times longer. Here it comes again. 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Actually going to be the long a vowel in the ah, dimension sequence but I was unable to make it to San Francisco. I guess we gotta get out of here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, we should close the show. This week's show was produced by myself and Ellen Horn with help from Robert.

[Robert Krulwich]

Krolwich, Max Bach, Brenna Farrell, Miguel Gomez.

[Jad Abumrad]

Estarn, Sally Herships, Niyuki Yakiranta, Amy o'.

[Robert Krulwich]

Leary, Volkan Ansel and Trent Wilby.

[Jad Abumrad]

Special thanks to Andy Lancett and Ben Adair. Very special thanks to all the track and field athletes featured in this show. Shawn Crawford, Amy Acuff, Brandon Cows, Derek.

[Robert Krulwich]

Atkins, John Drummond and Larry Wade.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jason Pyrez.

[Robert Krulwich]

Alright, I hope that works for you.

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Rebecca Solnit]

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[Jad Abumrad]

Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on.

[Rebecca Solnit]

US stocks and ETF' Hmm, that's music to my ears.

[Jad Abumrad]

I can only talk Investing involves risk, including your surplus.

[Robert Krulwich]

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[Oliver Sacks]

Sell order assessment fee not included.

[Jad Abumrad]

A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction based service fee of $100. See full [e-mail] commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services.

[Oliver Sacks]

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