[Dialogue] A meditation on Time

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

It is lovely.  Cynthia
 
 
January 23, 2007, NYTimes  
Making  Sense of Time, Earthbound and Otherwise  
By _NATALIE  ANGIER_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/natalie_angier/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  
More  than three weeks have passed since the great Waterford disco ball 
dropped over Times Square, and most of us are taking 2007 in stride.  The time is 
flying by, just as it does when we’re having fun, approaching a  deadline or 
taking a standardized test on which our entire future depends,  though not, 
oddly enough, when we ourselves are flying, especially not when we  are seated in 
the last row, near the bathrooms.  
But  before we stuff the changing of the annum into the seat pocket in front 
of us  and hope that nobody notices, it’s worth considering some of the main 
astral and  terrestrial events that make delightful concepts like “new year” 
and “another  Gary Larson calendar” possible in the first place. Let’s think 
about the nature  of so-called ordinary time, the seconds, days, seasons and 
years by which we  humans calibrate our clocks and merrily spend down our lives. 
As Robert L.  Jaffe, a theoretical physicist at _M.I.T._ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_tec
hnology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) , explained in an interview and recent 
articles  in Natural History magazine, our earthly cycles and pacemakers are 
freakish in  their moderation, very different from the other major chronometers 
that abound  around us, but of which we remain largely unaware.  
The  long and short of the universe is just that, almost exclusively long and 
short,  with the hyperclipped quantum clickings of the atom on one end and 
the chasmic  lollygags and foot drags of the greater cosmos on the other. We 
terrestrial,  tweener-timed life forms are the real outliers here, the kinky 
boots at the  party. 
So  what are the public and private rhythms by which we humans abide? Our 
prima  donna of a planet twirls on its axis once every 24 hours and so gives us 
our  days, and as it rotates it circumnavigates the sun to sketch out our 
365-day  years; and because the angle of _Earth_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/earth_planet/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) ’s spin 
relative to the big, flat platter of its  orbit isn’t straight up and down, but 
instead is tipped by 23 degrees, we have  our seasons, our cashmere and cotton, 
the heartbreak of clothing moths.   
These  cycles have been in place at more or less their current configurations 
since the  birth of Earth more than four billion years ago, and they have set 
the dials and  counters of virtually all life. Every cell of the human body 
pulses to a  circadian beat, sucking in glucose, squirting out _hormones_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/hormone
s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , building up fresh proteins and breaking 
down  stale ones, all in predictable swells and troughs throughout the day, a 
 rhythmicity that may help explain why we love music but still does not 
explain  the lingering popularity of Bachman-Turner Overdrive.  
Elsewhere  in the solar system are other worlds, taking care of their 
business, working  their quirky times. Saturn, for example, spins as snappily as it 
accessorizes,  completing a day in 10½ hours; but being almost 10 times farther 
from the Sun  than we are, it needs 30 of our years to finish one of its own. 
Mercury, by  contrast, orbits the Sun in just 88 days, but rotates a miserly 
one and a half  times during the entire mercurial “year,” which means that 
the side facing the  sun has a chance to bake to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, while 
the half staring out  into space turns as cold and miserable as that poor 
little demotee from the  planetary pantheon, Pluto.  
These  various blends of diurnal and annual cycles are all perfectly compre
hensible, if  medically ill-advised. But just as the light that we humans deem “
visible”  represents a tiny part of the vast electromagnetic spectrum, so the 
collected  clocks of the solar system are a meager sampling of the universal 
stock of  tockers. Far more action is going on below the surface, in the 
subatomic  community. There we find events occurring in increments far briefer than 
classic  quickies like “in a heartbeat” (i.e., about a second) or “in the 
blink of an  eye” (a tenth of a second), and down into the realms of scientific 
notation  blessedly leavened with Marx Brothers nicknames — intervals like the 
attosecond  (a millionth of a trillionth of a second, or 10-18 second), the  
zeptosecond (a billionth of a trillionth or 10-21 second) and, my  personal 
favorite, the yoctosecond (a trillionth of a trillionth, or  10-24 second). No 
matter the nomenclature; the duck soup is ever  astir. The time it takes a quark 
particle to circle around inside the proton of  an atomic nucleus? Midway 
between zepto and yocto, or roughly 10-22  second. For an electron to orbit the 
proton to which it is madly,  electromagnetically attracted? A 
not-quite-atto-sized 10-16 second.   
Fleeting  does not mean flaky or unstable, however. To the contrary: the 
fundamental  quivers of the atom “are exceedingly regular,” Dr. Jaffe said, 
adding, “They  mark the heartbeat of the universe.” Atomic events are so reliable, 
so like  clockwork in their behavior, that we have started tuning our 
macroscopic  timepieces to their standards, and our beloved second, once defined as a 
 fraction of a solar day, is now officially linked to oscillations in a 
cesium  atom. 
Or  look to the expanding firmaments, the unspeakably protracted pace of the 
space  race. Cosmic time is as difficult to grasp as the twitchings of the 
atom, but  it, too, is rule bound and reliable. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies 
are  moving away from one another in defined intervals as the space between 
them  expands like the rubber skin of an inflating balloon. They have been 
sailing  outward from one another for nearly 14 billion years, since the 
staggering,  soundless kaboom of the Big Bang set this and all clocks ticking, and they 
will  continue their dispersal for tens of billions, hundreds of billions of 
years  more.  
We  are poised between the extremities and homogeneities of nature, between 
delirium  and ad infinitum, and our andante tempo may be the best, possibly the 
only pace  open to us, or even to life generally. If we assume that whatever 
other  intelligent beings that may be out there, in whatever alpha, beta or 
zepto  barrio of the galaxy they may call home, arose through the gradual 
tragicomic  tinkerings of natural selection, then they may well live lives 
proportioned much  like ours, not too long and not too short. They’re dressed in a good 
pair of  walking boots and taking it a day at a time. And if you listen 
closely you can  hear them singing gibberish that sounds like Auld Lang  Syne.
 
Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
(http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla) 

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