Time is special. How we see it helps determine how we see the rest of the Universe. Physicist Lee Smolin has a new book out that says we’ve been looking at time the wrong way. Adam Frank digs in and offers his own perspective on Smolin’s argument.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/05/02/180037757/is-time-real
Tagged with npr science time book:title=time reborn
Alexander has been trying to build a clock that will last for 10,000 years.
Alexander has been trying to build a clock that will last for 10,000 years.
For the last few weeks we’ve been working on a special project at the Storyboard, producing episodes outside the studio, with a little more style than our usual interviews (cool as those can be).
This is the first of those new Very Special Episodes, in which I sidekick for an old friend, a musician named Paul Buckley, on a road trip.
Buckley’s trying to keep a promise he made to himself as a 15-year-old: to stand on his head in front of an atomic clock on 11/11/11 at 11:11:11. But the trip quickly turns into a deeper dive into the world of atomic clocks, timekeeping and the nature of time itself. Except also funny.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/10/storyboard-time-travel/
Tagged with storyboard science time atomic clock
Interview with @Wired Founder Kevin Kelly by Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/2012/05/11/kk.html Avi interviewed Kevin at his home in Pacifica.
Curator and historian David Rooney talked about the long-term experiment of Greenwich Mean Time.
> On reaching the corner of Greenwich Park, a quiet suburban district, the police had found, amid a motley debris of trees, bushes and railings, the charred and shattered remains of a man.
Newspaper report, 1894.
> Wait till they start on the Greenwich Observatory. London without time will cause them to wake up.
Suffragette conversation, 1913.
David Rooney is currently a curator at the Science Museum and formerly curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, and was involved in the installation of Longplayer listening posts at both museums. He is interested in the roles played by material artefacts in long-term institutional survival strategies, and the ways people can seek to destabilise experiments in normalisation.
Tagged with longplayer greenwich mean time science museum david rooney
Brian told the origins of his realizations about the "small here" versus the "big here" and the "short now" versus the "long now." He noted that the Big Here is pretty well popularized now, with exotic restaurants everywhere, "world" music, globalization, and routine photos of the whole earth. Instant world news and the internet has led to increased empathy worldwide.
But empathy in space has not been matched by empathy in time. If anything, empathy for people to come has decreased. We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal.
Danny Hillis proposed that there’s a bug in our thinking about these matters—-about long-term responsibility. We need to figure out what the bug is and how to fix it. We’re still in an early, fumbling phase of doing that, like the period before the Royal Society in 18th-century England began to figure out science.
Tim O’Reilly gave an example of the kind of precept that can emerge from taking the longer-term seriously. These days shoppers are often checking out goods (trying on clothes, etc.) in regular retail stores but then going online to buy the same goods at some killer discount price. Convenient for the shopper, terrible for the shops, who are going out of business, hurting communities in the process. The aggregate of lots of local, short-term advantage-taking is large-scale, long-term harm. Hence Tim’s proposed precept, now spreading on the internet: "Buy where you shop." Ie. When you shop online, buy there. When you shop in shops, buy there. Four simple words that serve as a reminder to head off accumulative harm.
Leighton Read observed that imagining the future is an acquired skill, and comes in stages. An infant can’t imagine the next bottle, or plan for it. A teenager can at most imagine the next six months, and only on a good day; on a rowdy Saturday night, Sunday morning is too remote to grasp. For us adults the distant future is still unimaginable. One thing that Leighton likes about the 10,000-year Clock project is that it lets you imagine a particular part of the very remote future—-the Clock ticking away in its mountain—-and then you can widen your scope from there, to include climate change over centuries, for example.
Alexander Rose suggested that we should collect examples where a small effort in the present pays off huge in the long term. Tim O’Reilly would like to see us develop a taxonomy of such practices.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss random and pseudorandom numbers. Randomness will be familiar to anybody who’s bought a lottery ticket or shuffled a pack of cards. But there’s also a phenomenon known as pseudo-randomness –numbers which look random but aren’t. So why are these numbers useful and how can they be generated? Melvyn is joined by Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford; Colva Roney-Dougal, Senior Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews; and Timothy Gowers, Royal Society Research Professor in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
Tagged with bbc in our time science mathematics randomness chance numbers
The history of ideas discussed by Melvyn Bragg and guests including Philosophy, science, literature, religion and the influence these ideas have on us today.
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the measurement of time. Early civilisations used the movements of heavenly bodies to tell the time, then mechanical clocks emerged in Europe in the medieval period. For hundreds of years clocks were inaccurate but now atomic clocks are capable of keeping time to a second in 15 million years. Melvyn Bragg is joined by Kristen Lippincott, Former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Jonathan Betts, Senior Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
Tagged with bbc in our time time measurement history science horology
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