Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What is it? Why isn't it the same everywhere? Can we travel through time? Will there be an end to time? Read on to find out
Karl Popper divided the world into clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess. The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe of clouds
The Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs
Useful backgrounder for non-physicists. What it is, why it isn't the same for everyone, what can distort it, why it has a direction and how you can argue it doesn't exist at all. Featuring Newton, Einstein, quantum mechanics
Short post, much to ponder about comparative philosophies of time. Britain, China and others want to keep Earth time closely aligned with astronomical time. International bureaucrats want to decouple: adjustments are too fiddly
Imagine a film, 24 hours long, made up of a montage of movie scenes featuring clocks or references to time, where each reference corresponds exactly to the time in the real world. All 1,440 minutes are included. It's just been done
Each one a cracker. "Time" is the most used noun in our language but it's still a mystery. Oddly, we all live in the past – about 80 milliseconds back. Stranger still, if we couldn't manipulate time, we couldn't have consciousness
Designed by Danny Hills. Paid for by Jeff Bezos. It's ready to go. "Over the course of its 10,000-year life span it will be able to power itself enough to keep time, synchronise with the sun, and randomly generate melodies"
Should gamblers factor the end of time into their calculations? Not a clue? Try the casino experiment which was "unbelievably perplexing, it seemed like probabilities were changing from one instant to the next without explanation"
If we travel back through time, can we change things that have already happened, and, if so, isn't that a paradox? Not if predestination stops us from interfering
Interesting analysis of how the brain copes with time and why it can seem to pass both slowly and quickly. New research reverses Heidegger's claim that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it”
Fine roundup of latest neuroscience research from conference on nature of time. From how we form memories, to the evolution of consciousness and the infamous 80 millisecond rule. Enjoyable and informative throughout
Sex Pistols’ "Never Mind the Bollocks" (1977) is closer to the second world war than to the present. The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” (1962) is closer to the first world war than to us
World's largest clock has been inaugurated in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Hasn't caught on yet, but Mecca Time could eventually challenge GMT. And, as this piece shows, arguments over the politics of time aren't new
Neuroscientist studies perceptions of time: does fear slow it down? And, “what if we were to land on a planet with aliens who live at a different time scale from us? Would we seem like statues to them, the way trees do to us?”
First collect your raw materials: a wormhole in space, a large hadron collider, a black hole, and a rocket that goes really fast. Even then, you will travel only to the future, not the past
The theoretical cosmologist discusses five books about space, time and the universe that even the science-shy can understand and enjoy
