On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast. Catherine Blyth

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СКАЧАТЬ Hopper was reluctantly demobbed at seventy-nine, two decades after the regular date. By then she was known as Amazing Grace, having popularized the term ‘debugging’ after fishing a dead moth from a computer’s innards. But she is best remembered for her post-retirement lectures. One day, fed up with being asked why satellite signals were so slow, she chopped a telephone cable into 11.8-inch lengths. This, she explained, doling them out to her audience, is the distance light travels in a nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Yes, even lightning speed takes time.

      Hopper stretched the limits of her era, ignoring rules and feminine expectations in order to prolong her career, as well as to turn computers into fatally word-friendly devices. Yet even one as resourceful as she could not locate time either within or outside an alarm clock, for the reason that time does not exist. Our units for measuring it – millennia, centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes – are also fictional. A nanosecond seems solid enough when you flop it about in a length of copper cable, but is no less arbitrary a way to measure our progress through the fourth dimension of existence than the gold stars on the badge of a McDonald’s trainee, marking his rise from novice to expert burger flipper. The crucial feature of seconds and years is their regular arrival (unlike McDonald’s stars).

      All units of measurement are belief systems created to organize facts. Universality bestows a veneer of objectivity, yet these units are no less subjective than the yard, which was introduced by Henry I, ruthless fourth son of William the Conqueror, who outmanoeuvred his brothers, standardized measures and restored England’s coinage. His yardstick? The distance from his thumb to his nose. Similarly, calendars are the legacies of quarrels between astronomers, theologians and monarchs. Although most of us follow the solar year (identified by sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus as approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds), the Christian, Islamic and Chinese religious festivals stick with lunar months, just like our oldest calendar in the Lascaux cave.

      In AD 398 St Augustine of Hippo queried the validity of such celestial yardsticks:

      I heard from a learned man that the motions of the sun, moon, and stars constituted time, and I assented not. Why should not rather the motions of all bodies be time? What if the lights of heaven should cease, and a potter’s wheel run round, would there be no time by which we might measure those revolutions?

      And it turns out that not even the sky is reliable. As life accelerates, the planet’s solar orbit is slowing by fractions of a second each year. Blame gales in our mountains, which cause the earth to jiggle on its axis, and the friction of tides, which drag the earth’s rotation by 2.3 metres per second, per day, every hundred years (an effect partially masked by a glacial rebound, since the last Ice Age, of land once trapped beneath continental ice sheets, which speeds earth’s rotation by 0.6 metres per second per day). This slowdown maddens the engineers who nurse the atomic clocks on which our communications and defence systems depend. After all, if these fall out of synch with the planet, a missile or satellite will veer off course.

      One nanosecond. One foot. If a misdirected drone were whizzing at you, you would care a lot about missing nanoseconds. But in general, such measures mean little to you and me, since our senses cannot compute such minuscule intervals. Time only gains purpose as a tool that we can use.

      What is the point of femtoseconds (a quadrillionth, or millionth of a billionth, of a second)? It sounds a nonsense word, perhaps a satirical comment upon the emasculation of time, slivered into such absurdities. But although Concorde could not have travelled an atom’s breadth in such a minute interval, scientists, aided by femtoseconds, can track, instant by instant, what transpires at the atomic level during phase transition, that mystifying moment when a liquid becomes solid and free-range particles suddenly lock into a lattice, like dancers at a military dance. Our tiniest temporal unit yet is Planck time (the time it takes light to travel 4 × 10-35 metres) – mind-boggling, yet necessary, since it permits quantum physicists to comprehend the force that keeps life turning: gravity.

      3. The comforts of time – or, why we love linear

      You too are a clock. The beat of your life is the tempo of events – occasions whose rhythm dictates how relaxed or stressed you feel. A life borne on a steady routine can be titanically productive, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant demonstrated, his schedule so unwavering that amused citizens of Königsberg are said to have set their clocks by his afternoon stroll.

      We invented time from a need for predictability. In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant observed that time is ‘at the foundation of all our intuitions’. Without it, how could we make sense of the world, distil lessons from experience, decide what to do when, or guess how long it will take? Time’s numbers and dates impose a reassuring form on vast existential uncertainties such as duration, decay and amorphous feelings like our sense of inevitability, empowering us to co-operate and compete as no other animal can.

      Anything that gives time definition and direction is a blessing if you are an upright ape whose life’s work is, essentially, to survive an unpredictable environment and convince yourself that fleeting existence has a purpose. Recalling yesterday, dreaming about tomorrow: these mental co-ordinates extend a miraculous thread on which to peg our lives, allowing us to weave irretrievable sensory data into something more substantial: a tale of who we are and where we are going. Time’s script gives us history, identity, accumulating meanings, reasons to stay alive.

      If time is foundational to our being, physicality defines how we conceive it. Concepts of time and space are interchangeable in indigenous languages, such as the Karen’s of Thailand. Soon is ‘d’yi ba’ – ‘not far away’. Sunset might be ‘three kilometres away’ (if that is how far you could walk in the time it would take for it to arrive). Similarly, we think of time as an independent, often impatient being – time ‘races ahead’ or we are ‘behind’ it. These metaphors are pale shadows of beliefs in time as independent divinities, like Kairos or Chronos. But the main reason that we see time as a moving spirit and life as a journey is that we are upright apes, striding on two legs, facing ahead. If a spider, jellyfish or side-shifting crab spoke of time, doubtless its vocabulary would be different.

      No doubt it is also because we are upright apes, who like to move on, race, climb, get ahead, that many of us feel contented only if we are metaphorically getting on – in a career or romance, or ascending a social ladder. Our craving for a sense of destination in life’s journey (once we called it heaven) is preferable to the depressing alternative: to see life in purely physical terms, as a wizened decline unto the zero of death. How much better to mark life’s milestones with accumulating numbers, from your first birthday to your hundredth, evoking achievement, progress: a story from a lifetime.

      Today, though, linear time has a challenger: our superfast, flexible hyperdigital telepresent. As a result, holding onto a sense of life as progressive – or simply getting through our plans from start to end – can be a trial. Operate on too many channels simultaneously and attention frays. This is dislocating. Time can resemble less a comforting anchor than a harrying tormentor. How much better to feel led by event time – placing your actions at the centre of a life that unfolds in meaningful chapters?

      For Ethiopia’s Konso, the hour from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. is kakalseema (‘when the cattle return’). The word is so sumptuous, you could stretch out on it and swoon. By contrast, an appointment at 17.30 has an icy ring. It embodies the difference between a life organized by numbers and according to personal experience.

      Few of us are tugged along by the rhythms of livestock, crops or the sea’s moon-bound tides. But we continue to weigh our days by events: what happens and what we make happen. If, come evening, we cannot account for ourselves – if the day passed in a forgettable rush – we can feel at best frustrated, at worst panicky. In the same way that studies find we are far better at fathoming how long it will take to reach a destination using landmarks than numbers, so time gathers meaning СКАЧАТЬ