The domestic time machine

Time remains one of life's most bizarre concepts.  We move around freely in three spatial directions, and can look wherever we like; and yet we are forced to move in only one direction in time, we cannot stop to admire the view, and must always look at where we came from, never where we are going. Which is probably why we bang our heads in life so often.

The ancients seem far less troubled by time than we are, perhaps because theirs was not a society obsessed with it.  Indeed, even the clocks were rudimentary, and the fundamental units were days, months and years.  Time as an independent entity, barely seemed to exist at all.  Similarly, for the great German philosopher Kant, time was regarded as a way of seeing things, a general property of the spectacles everybody's mind wore, along with the three dimensions of space.  It was only nearer our own era that time began to assume a richer form, and to assert some kind of independent existence.

Thus in the Special Theory of Relativity, born in the early years of the twentieth century, Einstein proposed the shocking idea of different times - relative ones, that is, depending upon your viewpoint.  Flowing from this was the famous Twins Paradox. Of two twins, one travels through space at an immensely great speed while the other stays on earth, When the space-travelling twin returns it turns out that he or she has aged a year or two, say, while the earthbound twin is fully twenty years older.  For the former, time has slowed down relative to the latter, and so the ageing process has slowed with it.  Nor is this mere theoretical speculation: highly accurate clocks have been taken on some of the later spaceflights and compared with an identical clock kept on earth.  The observed difference between the two is exactly that predicted by Einstein.
 
Against this background, and that of the even more disconcerting General Theory of Relativity which dissolves the hard distinction between time and space altogether, science fiction speculation about the possibility of time travel begins to look less fantastic.  The idea that we might be able to manipulate this strange thing called time is hard to grasp but not impossible to imagine. 

But really hard to believe may be the fact that time machines already exist.  This is not yet another top secret project that governments are keeping from us, but a device whose design is not only in the public domain, but whose implementation is to be found everywhere, and whose cost is only a few hundred pounds.  It is the refrigerator. 

Like the travelling twin in the paradox, food kept within a 'fridge ages more slowly - that is, does not decay or 'go off' as quickly. The 'fridge slows down time simply by reducing the temperature.  Nature has known of this trick for millions of years: hibernation is essentially about reducing the body temperature so as to lower the metabolic rate and with it the need for food.  Hibernating animals too are like the paradoxical twin, living life according to a different time.  This manifestation of one of science's great mysteries hardly demystifies it, but it does at least bring the whole issue much closer to home. In it, in fact.

(22.2.92)

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Good timing

We arrived in London ten minutes before we left Paris.  A case perhaps of things being better ordered in France - though the one-hour time difference had something to do with it. Whatever, our final transcending of time was emblematic of the whole trip.

It started well.  We drove straight from work to Gatwick, flew to Charles de Gaulle airport, took the train then metro, and emerged from an Art Nouveau-y exit to find ourselves a pierre's throw from the Seine.  In a little under four hours we had passed from suburban England, home of the quotidian, to central Paris, abode of all that is civilised.  Though the physical distance we had travelled was slight, in that short time we had exchanged worlds.

Perhaps time proved such a recurrent theme because the overall duration of our trip was a mere three days.  Forced to concentrate everything within that span, time itself became the prime medium and material: it could be pushed and pulled, dilated and dallied with.  And where better to dally than at the Café Les Deux Magots, erstwhile haunt of the existentialists.  As we sat drinking one of the inimitable cafe cremes of the city, opposite the gnarled and crumbling face of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, their philosophy of intensity of experience seemed inevitable.  Of course life must be drained to the last drop, with each drop; especially when those drops were such coffee, drained in such a Café.

Time also regained a new power by being unconstrained.  Freed from our daily routine, set loose in a new land without preconceptions, the day moulded itself around our will, which in turn responded to the ebb and flow of the passing hour.  We drank bottles of wine in our hotel room at three in the afternoon; sat on the boulevard and snacked at ten o'clock at night; stopped and drank yet more cups of coffee morning, noon and evening.  We travelled by foot, by metro and by taxi; without plan or premeditation, but as the mood took us.  By varying the means of transport, distance was telescoped, and with it absolute time distorted.

Perhaps too, the scale of Paris contributed to this shift.  In London, that great sprawling metropolis, everything is diffuse, in separate pockets.  You have South of the River, the West End, the City, each of which subdivides many times before reaching the human level.  But in Paris, the majority of sights and sites are bounded by the girdling boulevards built by that great tidier Haussman.  You can walk from the Latin Quarter - say Chelsea - to the Fauborg St Germain - Mayfair - to the Louvre - the British Museum - to the Pompidou Centre - the Barbican - without strain.  Which cannot be said of the equivalent areas of London.  In Paris, time is endowed with a density which is unavailable in England.

In the end this thickness of time comes down to what and how much you do.  If those three days seem unexpectedly rich in positive milestone experiences, it is a measure of the bounty which Dame Paris offers.  And an indication of the extent to which she continues her millennia-old role of noble hostess-cum-knowing whore, intent on giving those who are receptive to her manifold charms a civilised good time.

(21.5.86)

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Looking down the catenaries

It is easy to understand why every manufacturer loves anniversaries; it gives them an excuse to wheel out commemorative items, to put a new spin on workaday objects, individualising them with an anniversary label which both signals their immediate reason for existing and guarantees their imminent obsolescence. For the consumer, complicity in this specious commemoration offers the chance to live an enhanced life: each day, manufacturers tell us, is special because by an amazing coincidence something happened ten, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago; buy a useless token and you validate your otherwise pointless life.

There are, of course, more worthwhile acts of homage to the past.  The wedding anniversary can be an occasion of true remembrance for all the joys of a relationship; too often, though, it degenerates into routine or sham. The birthday usually escapes that fate if only because it is principally a selfish occasion, centred entirely on one person and on the less equivocal celebration of their continued existence.

But anniversaries and birthdays serve a more pragmatic if covert purpose: they are markers in time. Imagine life without birthdays, without ages; many people would find it hard to locate sequentially their past and the events it contained; instead, they would enter the great bag of memory, to join and augment the hopeless jumble already there. We need anniversaries as signposts to tell us where we are in time.

Time and space are the two most fundamental givens of every human being's existence; perhaps because of this deep commonality, we take them totally for granted.  Space is easier to come to terms with.  Space is defined by the presence of objects in it, and they in turn are predicated upon a physicality - which, by definition, is graspable and apprehensible. Time offers no such handholds. Its analogous definition is through one-dimensional durations, which lead to the idea of things existing for a time; unfortunately this timefulness - the correlate of spacefulness or extension - seems not to imply any useful idea corresponding to physicality.  Although we exist temporally through our thoughts which occur in time, that time proves a worryingly slippery concept.

How, for example, do we manage to think back over time for these anniversaries and commemorations?  A distance we can theoretically travel over again to re-win the experience; time is a one-off.  It is almost impossible to say how we conceive of time - we lack the appropriate words. The nearest I can get to articulating the idea of the past, of years, of centuries, is to visualise time as a suspension bridge made up of a series of spans stretching away into the far-off, misty past. In this image, each span is a century, with the hundred years hanging from the main steel cable like fluttering tags.  Clearly, this is a crude attempt to formulate a spatial analogue of time. For me, centuries are mapped neatly if arbitrarily onto catenaries - the name of the curve followed by such heavy cables suspended between two points. Why, I do not know; but without this construct, I would have no idea of a continuous, structured past; to our present-day anniversaries' besetting fault of false piety would be added the far more frightening one of complete meaninglessness.

(9.12.89)

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If I were a gnat

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a gnat.  Leaving aside the fact that as a gnat my brain would be too small to be able to answer the question, and assuming even more unreasonably that I knew what it felt like not to be a gnat and so could make comparisons, my main impression would presumably be like swimming in treacle.  For we tend to forget in such anthropomorphic fantasies that the world has a scale built into it, and that effectively the laws of physics would seem very different if we were a thousands times smaller – or bigger.

For example, ants are often cited as immensely strong for their size since they can lift many times their own weight.  Sometimes this is expressed in some such striking form as to say that if an ant were as big as a cow it could throw a combine harvester over its shoulder.  In fact it couldn’t, simply because its legs would buckle and break under the weight.  The strength of its body is defined by the material, and this does not change when you scale up the size.  So what is immensely strong when insect-small becomes as weak as any other organic material when the size of a human.

Another manifestation of this effect is to be found among the dinosaurs.  One reason why the very largest of them like the Brontosaurus are likely to have spent most of their time wallowing in shallow pools is that the stuff of their leg bones – which is the same in giant dinosaurs as it is in dainty gerbils – would probably have shattered under the immense pressure caused by propping up several dozen tons of Brontosaurus meat.  The animal simply would not have been viable without the auxiliary support obtained by partially floating in water.

The effects of scale can also be seen in much more homely surroundings.  When tiny children fall over with an apparently enormous impact, they often get up with almost no ill-effects.  Had an adult fallen in a similar way they might well have sustained serious damage.  In part this is due to the design of the child’s body: it is by nature very soft and supple, and the bones themselves are far less brittle.  But the scaling effect of physics also contributes: for children the impact is indeed less serious than for an adult simply because they are smaller.

Scaling can also be temporal.  Our personal sense is partly defined by the total time elapsed, or the total time remembered, which will obviously be less.  So, very roughly speaking, for a two-year-old child to wait six minutes is the equivalent of a twenty-year-old having to wait an hour.  Even though the scaling will not be exact, it does at least suggest why two-year-olds’ attention spans are so short.  Moreover, it also goes some way to explaining the converse slowing down of time for the old.  For an octogenarian an hour passing is like only fifteen minutes passing for a twenty-year-old, at least in terms of its relative weight in their life’s duration so far.

Thus whatever rulers and clocks try to tell us to the contrary, scales change.  We start near to the gnat, and finish near to the dinosaur.  Pity that in between we forget to make allowances for both.

(24.12.91)

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