Did it really ever start?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cosmology, time perspective, material engagement

Someone (several someones) said that "people generally get the leaders they deserve." That goes for universes. The Universe in which we live reflects the culture that gave rise to the concepts that are used to describe it. When did Cro-Magnon people, or perhaps Australopithecenes before them, first spin myths about the lights in the sky at night, and moon and sun? Things had come a long way by the time of Albert Einstein's gedankenexperimenten with railway carriages and elevators. Now, with our supercollider experiments and pocket telephones that idle along with cycle times measured in picoseconds, a few professional worriers are worrying out what might have happened during the first billionth of a billionth of a yoctosecond (that's 10^-42 or 10^-43 seconds, folks).

The time scales pertinent to a farmer are days and quarter-days, months and seasons in the yearly round. The Sun is the only clock needed. For the first few centuries after the invention of mechanical clocks, they had an hour hand only. The word "minute", pronounced my-nyoot', just meant really small; a "second" was the guy who backed you up in a duel. At some time these words, with fresh new pronunciations, became the go-to words for "1/60 hour" and "1/3600 hour". Now look what we have:

Each of the successive words in this graphic means 1/1000 of the one to its left. This Google Ngram shows the percent of books using the words indicated. Clearly, a century ago people got along just fine without dividing time up smaller than a second. Then Hertz and Marconi came along, and radio frequencies necessitated new words to describe their cycle times. The millisecond and microsecond came into their own with the invention of ENIAC. Note the sudden surge in "nanosecond" beginning about 1955. Early particle accelerators began making mesons and other "resonances" that only stayed around for a billionth of a second or less, and about every decade since there has been the need to write a lot about the next level of "tiny time". We're just getting going with attoseconds. In one attosecond (1 as = 10^-18s), light moves about three Ångstrom units, or 0.3 nm, the length of a water molecule. Attosecond computer cycles are unlikely to be achieved. The present record for overclocking a CPU chip is 8.429 GHz, which is a cycle time of 118.6 ps, or 118,600,000 as. The computer I am using right now hums along at a comfortable 3.05 GHz, a cycle time of 328 ps.

It does remind me of something said by Data in a Star Trek: Next Generation episode. Asked if he had considered betraying Captain Picard, he said, "Yes, for 1.78 seconds." Picard smiles with relief, until Data says, "Of course, to an android, that is an eternity." Well, Data may think on a picosecond or even femtosecond time scale, but our human brains still run on cycle times of 50 milliseconds or longer.

So there is one thing the Greeks got right when they mythologized about their cosmology: The oldest and most powerful god was named Chronos, or "time". How we think about time has changed over the past tenth-of-a-million years. Time itself? Not so much. But that may be about to change. In his new book About Time: Cosmology and Culture in the Twilight of the Big Bang, Adam Frank takes us on a journey through human culture, right to the brink of the theories that just may do away with time. What will replace it? Zeus replaced Chronos; will power replace time? Let's remember that Zeus was famously anarchistic (and promiscuous).

A central thesis of the book is that time and space are as much constructs of our consciousness as they are its source. A key phrase is "material engagement," the continual back-and-forth of our growing cultural concepts as mediated by our involvement in the material world. Einstein thought about events that seemed simultaneous as seen by a ticket-seller in a train station, and how they would be perceived by the conductor aboard the train. Particularly if the train were moving at a speed approaching 300,000 km/s. He compared it to the "perception" of a light ray itself, racing between railway station and the carriage, to convey the news about an event the station master wished to time. This kind of thinking led to the special theory of relativity, which still requires a strong dose of "de-befuddling" by physics teachers, so students can think properly about phenomena that occur rapidly at "relativisitic" speeds.

But what is material engagement? I got this quote from the man who coined the term, Lambros Malafouris:

"In the dynamic tension that characterises the processes of material engagement, sometimes it is the thing that becomes the extension of the person. At other times, however, it is the person that becomes the extension of the material agent. … Agency as an emergent property cannot be reduced to any of the human - nonhuman components of action."

(p 34 in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach; Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, eds. 2008). That is about as clear as Dr. Malafouris gets; his prose is mostly impenetrable. The key phrase here is "dynamic tension". It simply means that the material things in the world in which we live mediate what we can think about. Culture and cosmology define one another. A strong message of Dr. Frank's book is that now we have a language to describe cosmology that is more complete than anything previous. Pushing it to its limits (worrying about that first quintillionth of a yoctosecond), we have come to the limits of our ability to think about time.

Thus, the book culminates in the work of four "rebel" scientists in three areas. First James Barbour would convince us that there is no time, there are just "NOWs"; that causality is an illusion (although I suspect S.J. Gould, were he still with us, would have something to say about "contingency" mediating what is possible). Secondly, Andreas Albrecht, an early proponent of inflation cosmology (which I heartily reject), finds that the choice of one's clock determines the model of the universe that we must adhere to. An example is given (which I confess I found hard to follow), that by choosing what you use to measure time, you can transform the equations describing an electron's motion to equations that pertain to photons. If that is true, it is truly world (or universe-) shaking. In my physics education (before I turned to geophysics), bosons were bosons and fermions were fermions; never would the twain meet, at least not mathematically! Finally, Lee Smolin and Roberto Unger "look across the landscape of modern cosmology with its extra dimensions and other universes, declare them fictions and set off to deliberately forge another path" (p315).

Is it any surprise that such anti-establishment views can arise now, where we are on the verge of technologies that might just abstract us from the world? Is The Matrix to become true after all? And can machine-mediated thinking drive our thought processes into Data-like android territory? If time becomes malleable, it is no surprise that new cosmology theories will arise to match. That is the lesson of material engagement. Cultural shifts change the way we think, often in radical ways ("How you gonna get 'em back on the farm, after they've seen L.A.?"). Our ability to probe cosmology brings about a new cosmology. Then we push that cosmology to its limit. In the process, culture shifts, and new thoughts about cosmology become possible.

A final question is asked: "How much of the cosmos do we have objective access to?" (p 330). It seems, just considering matter, that some 75% of it is invisible, not reacting to photons. So-called "dark matter" is needed in copious amounts to keep galaxies from dissipating or galaxy clusters from evaporating. Maybe one day we'll discover "rubindium" and its sister meta-elements as postulated in Star Trek. But then there's "dark energy", which seems to be driving an accelerated expansion of the visible universe. I have been looking hard, and have yet to see anyone explore the notion that a Type 1a supernova in an extra-low-metallicity system (i.e., a very early one) might have a different intrinsic luminosity than a Type 1a supernova in a system with Z in the solar range. Until that question is fully dealt with, the "evidence" for acceleration is not just shaky, it is practically nonexistent.

A simpler way to ask the question is, "What can we really see?" In practical terms, we can see what we are looking for, and it takes a long time to see what we are not looking for. I appreciate those four rebels very much. They are not just asking the right kinds of questions, they have the intellectual tools to work towards answers to their questions. Not all of them will be right, but I would not bet against them. One or the other is likely to do work that will one day put the Big Bang on the shelf, along with Ptolemy's epicycles.

More on using the moments

kw: musings, time perspective

Three days ago I posted about how some little things I do daily add up over the decades. Of course, my thinking didn't stop there.

Most folks, upon reaching adulthood, have forty to eighty years yet to live. We all have things we must do, and we also do things we like to do. Our habits, weekly or daily, make up the days for us. So in our waking moments, what does a daily minute or a daily hour or quarter hour mean over forty years? If you come of long-lived stock, just double the figures below.

My baseline was the half hour spent each evening brushing teeth and showering, plus the cleanup and dressing, before going to bed. It was easy to note that this uses 1/48^th of my total time, or one full year out of each 48. Recalculating for forty years means 40/48, or 304.36 days (304d 9h).

Commuting to and from work used to take me two hours daily, but in the past 16 years, it has been ten minutes each way, which comes to 2/3 of that 1/48 of a day, or 1/72^nd of a day, but at a rate of some 240 days per year. In the past 16 years, it adds up to 53d 4h. During the prior ten years, the two daily hours times 240 days added up to 200 days commuting time. Earlier in life I usually had a short commute like I now do, so let's give those 21 years 1/72 of each of 240 days per year, for another 70 days. All totaled up, in 47 years of working life I have spent just over 323 days commuting, or 0.88 year.

On boring days the papers sometimes have an article about how the average American spends six hours daily in front of the TV. Some might, but I suspect for most of us it is less than that. One full hour daily with the TV, over forty years, adds up to twice my shower commitment, or more than 608 days. For the true couch potatoes who spend 6-8 hours daily? It comes to 10-13.3 years of the forty.

How about weekly activities? Some half of Americans spend an hour in church weekly. Ignoring getting ready and commuting, the "pew hours" come to 50 per year (52 for those who attend church while on vacation), or some 2000 hours over forty years. That comes to 83d 8h. Some churches seem to offer more; at least their devotees spend more time there. Say you spend 2 hours on Sunday (one hour in "Sunday school" and one in the "service"), and one hour midweek. That triple time attendance totals 250 days in forty years.

How many do laundry twice weekly? Does it take an hour of your time to wash and dry and sort a load? Maybe half that? That gets you into the same ballpark as attending church an hour weekly. What else do you do weekly; play a half hour of pickup basketball or tennis? That's just over forty days in forty years. How about hitting the gym (aerobics or treadmill) for 30 minutes three times weekly? That is 125 days in 40 years. Not a bad thing to do with just under one percent of your time.

So here are some round figures to think about:

• One-half hour weekly means about a day per year, or a bit over 40 days in 40 years.
• One-half hour daily is seven times as much: just over a week per year, or 43 weeks (actually 304 days) in 40 years.
• Anything you do 8 hours daily, whether sleep or watch TV, is consuming a full third of your time, which comes to 13 years and 122 days in 40 years. Let's just say such a habit finishes eighth grade over a forty year span!

That's all worth a little thought now and then, wouldn't you say?

Measuring the moments

kw: musings, time perspective

I tend to think all kinds of things in the shower. It is one of the very few things during which I can't read. I began to wonder how much of my life this daily ritual is taking up. With no paper or calculator handy, I was stuck doing estimates and rough calculations.

Of course, now that I am out of the shower, I can look up things like the number of seconds in a Tropical year (31,556,925 and change), but for horseback math, I just remember 31.5 million seconds, which equals half a million minutes (plus 5%, or 525 k) or just over 8750 hours (8,766). Similarly the "work month" of four and a third weeks (30.333 days) contains 2,620,800 seconds, which I round to 2.5 million; 43,680 minutes (43.5 k); and 728 hours.

The day I can remember exactly: 86,400 s = 1,440 m = 24 h. The week, being seven times as much, comes to 604,800 s (I remember 600 k), 10,080 m (10 k), and 168 h.

Now, how much time do I spend showering? The whole evening ritual, from brushing teeth to squeegeeing water off the walls takes half an hour. That's 1/48^th of my day, and that means that every 48 years I spend a year in the showering ritual. I don't think it has been the same length since birth, so I'll just count my adult life, so far 44 years since I was on my own at age 21. In four more years, I'll have racked up that year! Will I have time to accumulate a second year? Not likely; that'll take until I am 117. I have a reasonable prospect of living 90-95 years, but that's probably the limit.

Eating is quite variable. If I was doing all the cooking, I'd want to calculate that separately, anyway, but I find it takes me only about ten minutes to polish off a meal, unless I am at a buffet restaurant, where I can graze for about an hour. Let's ignore that and consider ordinary meals only: Another half hour daily, and another year accumulated per 48 years lived.

Then there are the big time-consumers, sleep and work. I have worked close to a forty-hour week since the age of 19, but my time off has increased in recent years, so that I currently work only 45 weeks per year, effectively, what with holidays and vacation time: 40x45 = 1,800 hours yearly. In earlier years, it was 40x48 = 1,920. Using 47 for a likely average, I find 1,880 hours. In 46 years, so far, that comes to almost 86,500 hours. Divide that by 8,750 hours in a year, and it is just under ten years (9.9).

Sleep is even harder to calculate, because I would sleep 8-9 hours in my twenties, but I get half that or less now. I can discern three periods in my life. Twelve years of an average 8.5 hours, twenty years of 7 hours, and the past fourteen years I average five hours, including any naps I take. That all adds up (using Gregorian years of 365.2425 days) to just under 109,000 hours. Divide that by 8,750, and we get almost 12.4. That's twelve years on the mattress just since I was 19, plus whatever time I spent sleeping in my childhood.

I spend a quite variable amount of time reading every day. Since it is in spurts (breaks, toilet visits, reading before sleep, before some meals—or after) I really can't pin it down, but it comes to an hour or two daily. That adds up to between 1/24 and 1/12 of my time.

Well, I could dig into more things, like hobbies, but I'd have to have a recorded time budget to get any accuracy. Instead, it got me thinking further: A doctor once said most of us get at least two billion heartbeats before the old ticker wears out. My resting heart rate is near 60 per minute, and two billion seconds comes to 63.4 years. So I am a few millions into my third billion. Three billion seconds is almost exactly 95 years. If I have, say, a half billion heartbeats still in me, and I retire soon, I'll have a "disposable time bank" of some 100,000 waking, usable hours. If I am lucky and live to 95, I'll have more like 200,000 hours available. How well will I spend that time?

Our fractured time sense

kw: observations, time perspective, calendars

I have been researching the 2012 craze. While I know it is largely a scam, I want solid data behind what I say when the subject comes up. At the 2012Science Blog I found the statement that we, as the Maya did, use multiple calendars. I hadn't thought such a thing before, so I contacted the blogger. Our discussion led me to some interesting insights. Firstly, While we do have different calendars in use by different cultures ("Civil" in the West, which is a Catholic calendar; then Chinese, Jewish and Islamic calendars used ceremonially by their various diasporas), just within the Western Civil calendar we have several ways of counting calendar time:

• Day names in a 7-day, or weekly, cycle (Sunday, Monday, etc. in English).
• Day numbers from 1-7 in the weekly cycle, but seldom used.
  
• Day numbers from 1-365 (or 366) in a yearly cycle. This "day count" is mainly used by merchants to calculate "shopping days until Christmas".
• Day numbers from 1-31 (or 30, 29, 28) used within a month; an irregular cycle.
  
• Week numbers from 1-52 in a yearly cycle, also rarely used but found in calendar/mail programs such as Lotus Notes.
• Month names in a 12-month, yearly cycle.
• Month numbers from 1-12 in a yearly cycle, mainly used for writing dates compactly.
• Season names in the yearly cycle. These are interesting, because we have at least three ways to determine a season boundary: Astronomical, Signs, and Business. Astronomically, Spring starts with the Vernal Equinox on March 21 or 22. The signs of Spring could be sighting the first robin or daffodil, or ice break-up on a river. Spring season for business purposes starts whenever garment salespeople decide to put winter coats on sale and begin filling the racks with lighter wares and seasonal items such as umbrellas.
• Business quarters, which are usually 91 or 92 days in length; Q1 begins when a business (or civil entity) begins its Fiscal Year; a cycle of four per year.
  
• Year numbers in a linear sequence. We have agreed-upon meanings for year numbers covering all of history since the Big Bang more than 13,000,000,000 years ago, but usually confine the writing of dates to periods beginning about 400BC with the Golden Age of Greece. Note that there is no "year zero" when using BC and AD (or BCE and CE), so 400BC equals year -399 in an undesignated count.
• Century numbers in a linear sequence. This is the twenty-first century.
• Millennium numbers in a linear sequence. This is the third millennium since 1AD began the first millennium. This convention is seldom used.

I had not thought before that our time systems are all cyclical for periods shorter than a year, and linear for years, centuries and millennia. We don't think of centuries and millennia as cycles, though we could. The current interest in December 21 (or 23), 2012 is because it (probably) is the last day in the Mayan "long count", which is not actually the longest period the Mayans wrote about, but was the longest cycle used for official inscriptions commemorating dates such as the coronations of kings.

We do have a "long count" of sorts to care for. The Gregorian calendar uses a 400-year cycle to determine which leap years to skip to keep the vernal equinox in the right place. The Gregorian Year is 365.2425 days in length. However, there is still a small fraction of a day left out. There are two definitions of an Astronomical Year, the Mean Tropical Year of 365.24219 days and the Equinoctial Year of 365.24237 days. If we want to keep our calendar lined up with the former year, we'll have to make a correction by about 4810AD; for correcting to the latter year, we can wait until about 9300AD, depending on how much the day and year length have changed by then.

So sometime before 4800AD we have to decide which astronomical year to adhere to. Ultimately, we keep our calendar in sync with the sky, so that the precessing equinoxes happen on the same day (within a day or two) year after year. And the Mayan long count? It has similar significance to December 31, 1999 (or 12/31/2000 for those of us who start counting with "one"!): the last day of a significant era, but with no prophetic meaning.

Six ways to experience time

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, self help, time perspective

Self-help books have a certain format: Faith-building; Establishing the authors' authority; Setting the stage, via historical or global summary; and Offering help. For some books, the last step is mostly urging the reader to buy a product. For the better ones, real help is offered. The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd, is of the latter sort. But be warned, the subtitle ought to read "With this new psychology of time, you can change your life." You can, indeed, but it will take work.

Fairly early in the book (pp 53ff), one is offered the ZTPI (Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory) and TFTPI (Transcendental Future TPI) questionnaires, and urged to complete and score them before continuing. I did so and had my wife do so. I chose a Radar plot to display our results:

What does this show? Each of us has an attitude toward the past, toward the present, and toward the future. Each attitude can be negative or positive, or some mix. Looking at the charts now, I probably should have re-cast them with the indicators in a different order, but they are still not hard to read: Both my wife and I tend to regret a lot of the past, and have relatively fewer happy memories. We both have a strong Future (meaning future positive, I could infer later) orientation, but an even stronger Transcendental-Future orientation. The latter item is logical for Christians. Where we differ (only a little, thankfully) is that she tends to be a little fatalistic about things ("I can't change that anyway") and less inclined to just enjoy life, while I am (moderately) the opposite.

I look at our chart as showing we are pretty well balanced, with a somewhat depressive tendency rooted in our negative outlook on the past, but an equally strong spiritual attitude. Now let us look at the information supplied by the authors about themselves, on a similar chart:


This shows two very compatible guys, who share a strong Future outlook (save for a rainy day; delay gratification), who have lots of happy memories, and who love enjoying life—put these together, and you have "work hard, play hard". They are distinctly not spiritual, and while they do not state it, are probably not religious at all.

It should come as no surprise that the authors promote this kind of profile as near-ideal. They spend quite a bit of space outlining the consequences of being too one-dimensional in any of the six traits.

Having established such a framework, they could present their answer to "What is the Time Paradox?" in extended form. The short answer is, we descended from apes that needed to find food, strove to avoid becoming food, and spent plenty of time either mating or fighting over mates and food. The most natural orientation was Past Negative (quicker reactions to danger), Present Hedonistic stronger than Fatalistic, and little need to plan for the Future. The world we live in today (in the First World at least), requires stronger Future skills than our distant ancestors had. In fact, for many of us, the world requires a time orientation that is the opposite of what we were born with.

The authors show how schools and other institutions are "Made for Futures", and frustrate those with a stronger Present or Past orientation. They show that too-strong a Transcendental orientation makes terrorism a perfectly logical response to oppressive environments that would induce Fatalism in others: Thus, suicide bombers aren't insane, but they are very differently oriented.

When it comes to helping oneself, the authors have plenty to offer. They have exercises throughout the book, such as the "Who am I?" worksheet: the question is repeated twenty times, and you are to reply differently to each one. There are similar worksheets that are more time-based (What was I?, What will I be?, etc.), and a gratitude exercise, for example. The kind of people who will find such changes the hardest to make are the Presents, both Fatalist and Hedonist. To them, the future is a nearly meaningless concept. It doesn't "fit in their heads."

A side note: I have an acquaintance with an addictive personality, the epitome of a Hedonist. It takes a real jackhammer experience to get him to pay attention to future needs, and then only for a short time. One would think that, after having his car stolen out from under him twice, having stared down the barrel of a gun, having been beat up by a drug dealer, he'd never return "there" again. But he is precisely what the Bible calls a "dog that returns to its own vomit." Sadly, I expect him to die young.

Which sparks a sort of proverb: Self Help is only for those with a Self to Help. Some folks don't have enough of a Self. But for most of us, simple skills like the Gratitude exercise (Quick, think of five things you're thankful for. Write 'em down. Repeat tomorrow and every day. Try not to do the same five every day.) can gradually adjust our Time orientation to make us a bit better than we were. Even if I have a different "ideal profile" in mind, it is an ideal the authors' tools can help me approach.