Dramatic moments, dont get dramatic and emotional about it. He said serve it cold, rather than you crying, let your reader cry by serving it cold. Thats what i tried to do. I dont mean cold like bloodles bloodless, but without any dramatic file in music. Thank you so much. I feel like we were just getting started, but thats the nature of this. My name is oliver. Im a columnist for the guardian. Im really excited about the panel we have today. Its kind of interesting to me , probably not interesting to anybody else on the planet. I stayed alive. Thank you. Its just one of those very ubiquitous reminders of how to function psychologically in our own life. Im the same person who was born 42 years ago. Why is it that the last few years seem to have gone by in about ten times the speed of the years when i was a teenager. Time is such precious resource. Why do i waste so much on twitter. I try to not use this. Its too valuable. Let me quickly introduce, and all medical order, we have alan, author of why time flies. He is a historian of science. He wrote a book called blackhole blues about Gravitational Waves and jim holt road wrote why does the world exist among other things. For me, i think one thing is so fascinating about this topic and thats the way that pioneers such as you pick what is daily source of stress and annoyance, we beat ourselves up for using it wrongly and we never have enough of it. At the same time this everyday thing is such a huge controversial and scientific and philosophical ministry. When you start to ask what time really is, theres many thought thoughts. Its really, really hard to answer that question. You find you can only talk about it in metaphors. We think about time as if it was space, boxes on a calendar, money, but when you try to put what it is in its own terms it leaves you a little lightheaded. I think we will solve this mystery today, but i wondered if i could turn to you first. Ill ask everybody to interrupt. Let me start by asking you if you could give us a sense of where physicists are now because you read this thing, anyone his red Popular Science has read this notion that somehow deafness and future needs are an allusion or maybe everything is all happening at the same time and everything is all happening right now. Its obviously ridiculous. There is an anecdote i get wrong, im actually not sure about the accuracy of the history but theres a saying that time is what keeps everyone from happening all at once. Im not really sure if he read it or if it was transcribed after he said it, but there are things peculiar and magnificent that we do know to be true, that are measurable and real and scientifically confirmed like time is relative. Its not an absolute. We used to believe that time was just like this backdrop, the stage in which the universe has unfolded and we now know thats not the case. If we are closer to the earth versus further away you will experience the passage of time differently. You will compare clocks to clots of the space station and they will not last. Its not an absolute. Depends on where you are at the universe if you are traveling relative to other objects and that malleability of time is already spectacular and true. But then there are other aspects that are still under investigation whether or not time continues to exist in the past after its unfolded and were just rolling through it like a ball down the hill. Like it rolls up like a carpet behind us and doesnt exist anymore. These are things we dont know and we do argue about it might be crucial to understanding the laws of physics and are still under the debate. The relativity of time which you think is counterintuitive, if we are drifting in space and i feel that i am still in you are still in relative to each other, my here is constantly getting out of sync with yours. Why shouldnt it be intuitive. It is intuitive. Heres the spectacular thing. We are very confused with all this distraction. There does seem to be a frame of reference like this table or the earth or whatever imagine an astronaut floating in space, if i can remove everything distractive, then it becomes intuitive in the way you describe it. But here theres no frame of reference. I see another astronaut whiz by near the speed of light. He looks like hes aging very slowly relative to biological norms and his clock is ticking very slowly but from his perspective, i am the one with the slow clock and aging slowly is no physical meaning to it. Its only intuitive when you remove Everything Else. There is an idea of the round elephant and in this case its true Everything Else i hope that wasnt longwinded. Was that the whole hour. It wasnt longwinded at all im still not sure im there with the idea that even the possibility of things that have already happened are still ther there. Behind me is still there. Even though im not occupying that space. Time is peculiar because unlike space i can go back behind me later be today but i cant go back to 3 00 p. M. We dont know why time is different in that particular way. I cant make an accidental turn into yesterday. We dont know why its different because in many respects time looks like the spatial dimension mathematically. It is peculiar that it insists on prodding forward. One possibility is that theres always been a strong resistance that this whole frame were looking at is hilarious. We look at this very important debate. I wonder if you can just briefly summarize what this is about. I can try. Most of the discussion is from the question of what is time to who is authorized to speak about what is time so in that sense, i think going back to the historical sources so its a debate between a french philosopher who was more famous than einstein at the time and she actually met einstein one day on april 6, 1922 and a new einstein, who he was because i was a historian of the 19th century, and i saw them together in the same room debate about the nature of time and it was a day that had echoes for the rest of the 20th century and that really came to represent the divide that you talk about, the divide between telling time in movies , cinema, literature, poetry and a scientific way of telling time. Its a book where i dont take sides. Its a book about the divided 2h century, its a book about the division between science and humanities and the rights of the authorities of science, the people, the person embodied in einstein who could talk about time and tell us what time actually is. But i think if we go on with the conversation i want to take everybody. I dont want to take every time. Perhaps i can say little bit more about the specifics. The idea of flow, time flowing is very important. That is something that has no role at all in einsteins conceptual world. Absolutely. Its generally characterized as psychological time so for example the person who tells us why time slows differently if youre doing something really boring and it seems to go really slow this is a bit simplistic and both men used his clock in einstein as his personal correspondence repeatedly talked about how time flies for him. We need to go beyond seeing this division in the two men but the gist of it was disputing that time was like space and also that there was no privileged frame of reference. Even if they agreed that at that time you could not have an experiment that could help you distinguish these frames of reference, he would say that the world, the earth was a privileged frame of reference for the time being and considering that on the same level as the astronaut that flies close to the speed of light is science fiction. It was one of the reasons why they seem to lose the debate against einstein. Thats a common interpretation. In the view of the critics, he did not understand the science of relativity. It was einstein who did not understand him. The moment for me, in a moment when time is something in physics to psychological in the fourth century when he basically says time is strictly in the mind. Before then plato and gino and aristotle, they had all been wrapping themselves into a not to figure out what now is and how long is it. Is it this big. How do you get from one to the next. Forget all of that. He just wants to deal with the internal experience and he offers this great example of him speaking out loud. He is saying a series of syllables and they come out one after the another. I know that one syllable is longer than the next, but how do i know that and when am i doing that measurement. I cant be measuring two of them at the same time because im only measuring one of them. Then he realizes we talk about the past and the present for future but the really all the same thing. There is our present experience of memory, of what we just said and theres this present experience of the future of what were about to say and theres a present awareness of what we are saying right now. He says every moment basically you are stretched between the memory of what youve said and anticipation of what youre going to say. He said its just an amazing craze. He said its nothing other than tension. He meant jim means that tension between you, stretched out. I wouldnt be surprised if its not the tension of consciousness itself. He is basically equating time or your experience of now which is what a lot of us mean with consciousness. I just wonder in this psychological definition if you think the universe requires us to exist. Its very unlikely we will be here in a few hundred thousand years. Does the universe continue to involve in time or does it require a psychological definition based on consciousness which probably emerged from the climate in which we process data certain way. There kicking the can down the road because were not talking about time. Our talking about is our perception of time and actually our perception of time is a whole series of perceptions. It your understanding of how Long Duration is for how long you think it is in your sense of beforeandafter and all those things go into. One of the things you do is go on this personal adventures in manipulating our experience and you see what happens when you take away the rhythms of light but are we talk about two completely Different Things . Is this a panel of the history of australian cookery . Its like the psychology, these unrelated things. Show. Sure, to a certain degree, where i began to think of it, and again like psychologists are talking about perception, but its not like, we experience all these bending the time like the man stuck on the bridge and it just felt like it was taking forever. Time is expanding and contracting depending on your situation, but the neuroscientist would say its not like there is some accurate representation of time in your brain with which you have the subjective experience. There is time we know on the clock but its not like you got some accurate clock in your brain and then you got this function thats constantly screwing up. Its just that function, the two is the same. That said, does that mean time doesnt exist . I begin to think that time does exist, almost as a language. It serves the purpose of stitching together these experiences that we have, the things that happen in moments but its not that it does exist. Is a great reference and you bring it up and if nobody asks him what time is, he knows perfectly well, and if somebody asked him, he says he knows not. Id like to become a middle you is just because of that. Where you see the divided way of thinking about time once the rational, if i think about it, i no longer know. If i dont i know perfectly well. Id like to see this not as a solvable conflict, but the way that its always been. Weve always had this contradictory times and ways to solve it. Why do we set up crops and us use clocks. Why do we use clocks . How have they taken upon themselves to find a way to stop the fight. Can i ask you. I know you are suggesting we speak a bit about what it means to be here. Here we are, we are living a moment at the beginning of the t century. You might ask why are we living in the age of george the third or back in the age. [inaudible] its an interesting question or maybe a foolish question depending on your mood at the moment. You might ask how we can thing about this. Here we are in brooklyn in the third most populous country in the world and in that sense we are non special. We are not living in some remote unpopulated corner were all the rest of the people are. Nothing should be surprising there. Consider where were living in time. We are living at a moment when 20 of all the people who have ever existed exist now so its not so surprising we should exist now rather than existing several millennia ago when the retire population was only a couple hundred thousand. Thats kind of interesting. You might think what does this tell us about the rest of humanitys or our future. Just imagine there is this urn of life where all humans are represented and as time proceeds markers are drawn over the earth and here we are we been drawn out into the existence of the human species and you might ask how long is this process going to go on. If you reason about this and think about this and you think were not special and about 40 Million People have already existenc existed, would we simmer into existence. You would only expect another 40 billion people until humanity is extinguished somehow. That would put us read about in the middle of the whole process and make us very ordinary, very nonspecial. Most of servers, thats another three or four centuries. So its an indication that we should be a little bit concerned about the future of humanity. If we are not very special, if were in the middle of this metaphorical drawing, we shouldnt expect humanity to go on much longer. It suggests theres some sort of extinctio extinction processor doomsday scenario. If it goes on for millions and millions of years and we colonized the galaxy and other galaxies theres the people in the future. Its kind of like adam and eve sitting on the home planet at the very beginning of the process. That would make us very special. This is just a liberating way. Also, to continue to dribble on, you said we dont have enough time. We all live less than a hundred years, pretty much. If you put that in a second, thats about 3 billion seconds and when you put it in those terms its not so bad. If you want a really basic clock, the tick of the clock is going to be. [inaudible] in that measure of time, we live almost as long as the universe. The universe has existed. I worked it out. If the universe is 60 units old, each of us lives about 52. 5 units. Im coming back to the same question if these are two completely divergent topics. I think they are but it doesnt make it an interesting to compare them. I think we all showed up at 5 00 p. M. And in a race to get here, and none of us were quibbling about whether or not this was 5 00 p. M. Maybe we should be asking that. We might ask it, but here we are. I think there are really interesting dimensions to the psychological aspect, not totally unrelated from the physical aspect. We all know its a subjective measure. In this day and age, all of our cell phones basically tell the same time. Why is that. Upstream there is a National Laboratory that has a fancy clock. It basically has a measurement of a second based on a measurement in the 1960s. It uses an atomic clock to measure the most accurate and it adds 86400 of that and it gives you a 240 2400 a 24 hour day. That all works for us and keeps us on the same time but the problem is there are National Labs and atomic clocks all over the world. They also have to figure out what time it is right now. You would think about them theres some even bigger clock thats even fancier and i went looking forwar for it and its totally counterintuitive. Its an agency in paris thats just a group of scientists. The way they work as they have all these National Labs and their clocks kick out their most accurate second or representation of a second. Its called realizing a second. They compare everybody seconds and they say jim, your second is like. 0042 fast and years is just a little slow. It takes him several days to do this. Once a month they send out a newsletter. It used to be a paper newsletter announce email and it tells everybody how to track their time. They say the most accurate time in the world is this in a show you how slow or fast your clock was last month. We are living moments moment on this average. That we decided a month ago. Space is no different than time where we have to reconcile what we mean by a foot or meter and theyre off because theres an on certainty. In addition to determining the standards theres the question of reading the standards and the practices that teach you how to read a clock. We need to take psychology out of science. Its made by humans and used by humans. Its not clear if we talk about time and a bit more philosophical way. Its not clear that we can extract the psychological from the objective because clocks were made by humans and they go to events that matter to them. Id be curious as someone who deals with his ex, how do you square the physics of it and the psychology of it on a daytoday basis. I live in the blissful denial that im not trying to reconcile those things. The notion of time that im interested in is very much the physics notion. There is no room for the psychological notion because most of what i do, im interested in what happened over a billion years ago before the risk human beings and before there was psychology. Doesnt say nothing about the fact that all of my events lie in the future of that event. The direction of time, we remember the past but not the future. Its a phenomenon of physics that has to do with the fact that the universe began in a highly awarded state and one of the implication known on its being pushed in the future away from our birth and death which is one of the most compelling psychological aspects of time. Thats something that physics does shed light on. It doesnt tell you why time seems to flow but it tells you why the future is different from the past and why we can affect the future and why the causal change that we initiate going to the future and not the past and why we remember the past and not the future. Thats physics. It could be incredibly interesting in ways that you describe. We are observers of this world and theres an observation we make and that observation is that we dont remember the future exactly as we said and we only remember the past and for whatever reason we cant sit still in time. There are questions we have answered. Jim just said an interesting thing but its actually not a complete solution. We know its not a complete solution. We know a movie is Going Forward when the glass breaks and goes into a state of disorder and if we see is glascow from a state of shard into the reassembled goblet, we know the movie is running backwards. Thats our idea that time moves in the movement of increasing entropy and not decreasing entropy. To use the psychology to understand the laws of physics, its really the other way around. Of course its interesting to connect these things. We still dont understand, sometimes it doesnt increase. It is absolutely possible that entropy spontaneously changes. We just dont understand these things fully yet. It is possible that all the particles in the room will choose to spontaneously organize into the lefthand corner and we will suffocate. Its terribly unlikely, but it is the law of physics and yet its just unlikely. We live with this tendency, but the time fields are much more forceful than that. I think the brooklyn book festival has no ability to stop time. I dont want to shift away from this completely. I think its part of the same question but i wondered if you could speak briefly, im very strictly this idea, and this is sort of a historical angle. Is there a strong case to be made that people in centuries past experience time in a way thats fundamentally different to us . Is there a certain way in which we have fundamentally altered. It think it was radically different and its an exercise that still needs to be done to actually go back to our sources without our preconceived notions of time and try to figure it out. I think what would be quite surprised, theres this part of time telling that is connected to literacy and the order of the words and speaking, but you have to ask also how it was experienced in other cultures. One of the things that strikes me about the conversation is that very frequently they bring up the example of the film in reverse. That makes me think that the introduction of cinema and the First Experience of actually playing in reverse any experiments by the linear brothers, reversing film made us think that time went differently and that was connected to the same historical. As when the science was discovered and created. I think there is a lot that can be gained by going back to the practices and the instruments. Something, for example, just another short comment about the book, the tenth of a second, its a history book that starts around 1850, but thats the first time that people noticed that there was a reaction time, that when you have a dog pass in front of your card takes about a tenth of a second to step on the brake or that you have to have the illusion of movement. At the time the car, that was a crazy idea. We thought people were in sync with the world because we didnt have the experience of all these things that came with the interes instruments of maternity. They came with wheels and brakes and telegraph keys and then made us realize that we were in dela delay. You can go dig all you want before the 1850s, and you wont find scientific articles that express the reaction time , time of the speed of thought. Its just not there. There was this moment of crisis in astronomy during the h century when, used to be the way that you would synchronize your clock with your neighbor. You would essentially go to the observatory and youve got an astronomer sitting in there and hes waiting for certain stars to cross a meridian line and hes got a telescope and i say he because they were all he and if they would look at the clock and time it as this little dot crosses the line then he would mark down when that happens but it turns out because of this, that estimate is always going to be wrong and an astronomer suddenly realized they had what they thought was the personal equation, everybody had this air they could not correct for and it was ultimately physiological. The way they dealt with it is they didnt. They just stopped looking at the clock and watched when it stopped and they let the machine do it for them and that basically eliminated the problem because then everybodys reaction time was much more consistent than looking at the clock and trying to remember what the clock is doing. Related question to that which is the version of the question that you put before, i think the intellectual journey and the personal experiments, has this changed your daytoday experience of existing in time in some sort of lasting fashion . Does learning about these thing things, does it change how you live in the world . I think its maybe a little more relaxed in a strange way. I spent a lot of time thinking about circadian clocks that sort of have had the same problem, they each have an accurate genetic timepiece and theyre all trying to correlate with each other through master clock in the brain and that has to coordinate with the sun, but things can get out of sync. Anyway, i had kind of gone into this project with this idea that time is this terrible thing thats getting in my way and its pressing down on me, and then i realized its very much something that comes out of me, not just biologically but also psychologically. William gaines is just kinda beautiful on this point. He talks about lying awake in the middle of the night and thinking about these nouns that are popping out at him. Hes thinking what is now. He realizes that theres no such thing as an empty moment. There were experiments done to try to figure out what part of your body can detect and he realizes no such thing. All there are, psychologically, a moment of time is something in which something changes and the very least thing that can happen that can change in the middle of the night is that you have a thought or the lights flicker on the back of your eyelid and not enough to signify that a moment is happening and its changing. So, what is filling up now is you. You are filling now. Its kind of an augustinian thing that essentially equates a moment of time with consciousness but i was really afraid to go too far but whats comforting in a way that whatever time is in a strictly physics sense, what it is exponentially is something that emanates not something that comes outside at me but comes out of me and that we all share and we sort of need in order to spend time together and to be here at 5 00 p. M. I would love to know if any of you have questions for our panel in the closing hour. I suppose it got to ask you to keep them brief but then nothing we talk about is susceptible. Can you talk about string series and bubbles and what do we mean if theres parts of the universe that are shaped so entirely differently that time is a completely different concept. It is, once you start thinking of time is a dimension, you imagine the universe was created with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, you start to ask why three and one. These questions were posed very soon after. This predates string theories that people started talking about the possibility that time had multiple dimensions that were unaware of. You talked about the psychological aspect of being observations. There are three spatial dimensions. To find ourselves here we mention the time, north, south, east and west and up and down for there were four coordinates we need to specify for us to be here. Where are these other, while g lost in some transverse dimension because we didnt specify. These are really deep questions. In string theory, one of the suggestions as they are small. I literally cant stick my hand in the. There wrapped up and they have a particular shape. This is stuff we work on all the time. One of the ideas is that every possibility that happens, we just live in one possibility and their other universes where the dimensions are large and you can stick your hand in them and defined yourself in the conversation of the book book festival, we have to specify the tenth dimension. There are reasons it couldnt live in a world with more or fewer than three dimensions. Viewer is problematic. But you cant have a skin enclosing an interior and less than three. You cant have an orifice that cut your body and half and still be an entity in less than three. There are funny restrictions. Getting higher just means it just might be hard for me to find you. I dont think their stable environments and higher dimensions he can have chemistry and if you assume. Chemical orbits . This should be. [inaudible] so these are very interesting and very real questions and we dont know the answer but its why have a job. Right in front of me, sorry, yes,. I just want to post something and get your reaction. If we can return to the interpretation of time which predates einstein which is the time from the time machine, that time is one of the four dimensions of a four dimensional system that we live in and that it is a dimension and that we have our own velocity, we have a certain velocity along that time dimension and to the degree as individuals we are prisoners of time, which we are not in space. Given that, that means time, if time is a dimension, that means it exists outside of us, we have our own velocities along the time dimension, but if we start describing time as something that is personal to us and due to personal interpretation, we start getting into areas of well, did the past happen 4 billion years ago, did happen 400,000 years ago and we start, we are opening the door to a lessening of truth, a lessening of an acceptance of truth. The speed of light is 186 Miles Per Hour second, as we defined second which is defined by very solid astronomical criteria, that is not fake news. Whats the question now. The question is, if we start thinking outside of the idea of time in terms of physics, are we not leading ourselves down a dangerous road in which nothing is definable. Let me jump in. We been talking about time and it occurs to me we have not really defined how it works. When i talk to psychologists were scientists, what you think time is, they would all say to me what you mean by time. In a psychological sense, its a whole bunch of things. Its our experience of duration, its our expanse of what time it is right now and before and after which turns out to be an incredibly plastic experience. Like what is now but these are all really distinct experiences. Im not sure, have we really said what time is in a physics sense . Is it like change. I could Say Something about that, it is very much part of the debate between einstein and brooks and one of the reasons why there was such a big decline in. [inaudible] in the philosophy because of this fear that he was talking about something that was not really real and that that was the apocalypse, but it got us to fake news and postmodernism and all these horrible things. During the meeting, the 1922 meeting, einstein was talking about time and he said the time of the philosophers does not exist. That was the detonator to this big debate. But the way that they have since answered this question is not in this binary, theres specific so theres apocalypse, but rather saying how in physics, physics also uses stories, physics is a practice of historically situated, its done by physicists. With the hope of getting to a yet sturdier concept of time that is one that acknowledges the way that it is used in general society and that its knowledge is how how its made and our relationship to instruments of measurement and that. But i dont think its an idol fake news or physics option. Lets take another question. About you. In the front on the right. Thank you. Professor, when you said states exist for us after we passed through it, but maybe maybe not time, so i was thinking, what if you had, in other words maybe time thats passed no longer exists in our presence, but if he you had a folding of space that connects our presence to the past, that would create a paradox without becoming possible if time, if the past no longer existed . In einsteins formulation, it is implied that the past and the future just laid out. Its a map. You make a map and it saves time and is not treated differently than space other than at the different curvature on the map. Its just not, technical mathematical map at the time but you make a map and in that map it is actually surprising but its a reality that its possible to go back in time. They are not ones that we think are easy to realize, but nonetheless that should give you pause. It did give einstein cause. The brilliant mathematician used to walk to the institute and he brought this up. He was one of the first people to discover a universe that rotated allowed you to go back on these. It does create paradoxes, but those are pretty subtle. You have to presume that i go back in time and they kill my grandfather before my parents were born in so i created this paradox so how could i be born to go back into my grandfather. That assumes i have something to tranc transcend the law of physics. That i can choose to do something inconsistent with the laws of physics. There are other really interesting stories where i imagine i go back and i shoot my grandfather and then theres a sort of degree of possibilities. One is that i only injure him which is why my father is born kind of bad and i am a rotten kid and then i come back and she my grandfather. Its definitely interesting, but whether it can be done with anything bigger than a Single Particle is unclear. Another question. Mine is more of a comment. By training and a former paleontologist. What the doctors talking about , as we know in the Geological Sciences is that deep time, although here, if you begin with general jones or looking at 4. 5 billion years ago, i dont think this is true in physics, but in geology theres a very strong sense that the linearity in time, if anyones interested, i can mention the writings of the late Steven Jay Gould who wrote extensively about time. Anyway. But you second row from the front. There might be a little bit of an unnecessary question that i was wondering, is there discussion about how time is watched . And time is passing and we understand that its changed, but the change is something that is witnessed by something, some entity, and i think you spoke a little bit about consciousness and i dont know if you can expand on that, but it seems that when you mentioned the quote about i know what time is, but when you ask me i cant think about it, is this because there is some conflict with thought and your mind cant conceive of time, but you know Something Else knows what it is so if you are not the witness of time, then time is the witness of you . Or are you the witness of time . And time is not the witness of you. This is probably an area in which one has to really defined terms very carefully, like what we mean by time. In our sense that something is changing. Again, they would say, because they are psychologists in the not really dealing with the physics, they are saying the most fundamental change you can experience is the change in your own thoughts. The fundamental unit of time is the smallest amount of time in which something changes. For him thats like consciousness right there. And so, his kind of time means its all a bit circular, but in that formulation, the kind of time he is talking about but it does not really exist without an awareness. Insects leaving just the last few minutes of this discussion to take you live to the floor of the senate who is taking a pro forma session. Provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3 of the standing rules of the senate i hereby appoint the honorable luther strange, a senator from the state of alabama, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed orrin g. Hatch, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order the Senate Stands adjourned until 4 00 p. M. , adjourned until 4 00 p. M. , as expected, just a short pro forma session. You can find our coverage of the brooklyn book festival online. You can visit booktv. Org. No legislative business expected today