[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is the sound of a—what's the exact title of the piece?

TERRY WILCOX: 3500 AD.

JAD: This is the sound of 3500 AD.

[knocking sounds]

JAD: I'm knocking on an object that artist Terry Wilcox hopes will be here long after we all turn to dust.

TERRY WILCOX: It's actually fastened to the bedrock. The engineering is that it'll withstand a 200-mile-an-hour wind.

JAD: This thing right here. Wow.

TERRY WILCOX: I mean, that's like a nuclear bomb.

JAD: 30 years ago, Terry and a few cranes lifted this 40-foot stick and plunged it into this boulder that we're standing on which overlooks the Hudson.

TERRY WILCOX: And the George Washington Bridge is to our right.

JAD: The sculpture reflects the sun like a mirror, and it's made out of two metals.

TERRY WILCOX: Aluminum on the outside and magnesium pieces.

JAD: The concept is simple: one day, many moons from now, these two metals will be one.

TERRY WILCOX: The phenomenon is they're mixing together.

JAD: How do you mean?

TERRY WILCOX: Physically, the layers where the metals are touching, they're physically intermingling, they're evaporating into each other.

JAD: It's a process called diffusion.

TERRY WILCOX: And in fact, I'll tell you how I heard about it. 1968, they've opened some minor tomb in Egypt and they find gold and lead bars piled up in the corner. The tomb was about 5,000 years old, and the bars had become a solid piece. They think it's happening on an atomic level, but they're not sure. But something is making the metals mix.

JAD: Maybe just time. Time cracks foundations, erodes borders, erases anything man creates: civilization, art. Particularly art. Time hates art, that's why museums have restorers. But here's Terry trying to collaborate with time. In fact, he says this piece won't be done until time takes the aluminum and the magnesium and fuses them together, which he calculates will take 1,495 years. In a sense, that is when this clock will chime.

JAD: But until then, all you can really do is look at it. So we walk around this piece.

TERRY WILCOX: Somebody made it up on this side. God bless!

JAD: You think they scaled up there?

TERRY WILCOX: On the bolt. Sure!

JAD: It says, "Bill—Bill, number 98" or something?

JAD: Underneath Bill 98, Park officials have slapped on some anti-graffiti paint.

TERRY WILCOX: Some of that paint's still wet.

JAD: Terry pulls out a pocketknife, and starts to chip some of it away. Underneath the paint, we find more graffiti.

TERRY WILCOX: Yeah, it's the graffiti.

JAD: Then we find a bullet hole.

TERRY WILCOX: This is a bullet.

JAD: Oh my gosh, somebody shot your art.

TERRY WILCOX: That's pretty funny.

JAD: Do you think it'll make it?

TERRY WILCOX: Make what?

JAD: The 3,500 year journey?

TERRY WILCOX: I have no idea.

JAD: What do you think the world will look like when this piece is finished? Do you think any of these buildings, the George Washington Bridge will be there?

TERRY WILCOX: These buildings? No.

JAD: While I try to get Terry to philosophize with me, a group of kids approach.

JAD: How old are you guys?

BOY #1: 15.

BOY #2: I'm 15.

GIRL #1: I'm 15.

BOY #3: How long did it take you to make it?

TERRY WILCOX: Almost two years.

JAD: And when he explains that it won't be done until these kids and their kids and 72 generations yet to come are all dead and gone, their reaction is interesting.

JAD: How come you guys are touching it? I mean, what makes you want to touch it and grab it?

GIRL #2: To see if it's real.

JAD: They begin to touch the sculpture, put their palms flat against it. A few even hug it. It's an odd sight, but understandable. And it comes perhaps from the same impulse as Terry's art, as the graffiti, of wanting to leave something of yourself behind, send something of yourself forward into the future. As if to say, "I was here, if only for an instant."

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad, and this is Radiolab. Today on our program, stories and conversations with people who swim upstream in the river of time, even though it's an impossible task. And speaking of the impossible, here is my co-host, Robert Krulwich.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And in this hour, we will be having an argument with time. We will talk to scientists who say that time doesn't exist. We will talk to stubborn people who argue that, well, maybe it exists, but we're gonna pretty much refuse to notice.

JAD: And we'll hear from a guy who thinks he can turn time around, turn it back.

ROBERT: Or defeat it.

JAD: Through sheer will.

JAD: Now to get things started, Terry Wilcox, the guy we just heard from, toward the end of our conversation, I asked him, "What are you afraid of? A nuclear bomb, maybe, coming and blowing everything away, your sculpture included?" And this is what he said.

TERRY WILCOX: No, what scares me are the guys out at Stony Brook that were just at our dinner, two of these physicists who have the government funding and are trying to create a universe. I'm not kidding! I go, like, "You know what happened the last time a universe was created?" And he says, "Yeah, we're kind of worried about that."

ROBERT: They do very odd things at Stony Brook.

JAD: So it seems.

ROBERT: Which is the location of one of the big super colliders in the eastern United States, at Brookhaven, it's called. And so I went on the tour with—the tour guide was named Todd. He was wearing, as I remember, a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. Now it was a little freezing, but he said, "All right, let's—let me show you around."

TODD: So we can give you a little tour around our ring. It's two and a half miles around. It's almost exactly the size of the Indy 500 race track.

ROBERT: And we drove alongside a tube. I guess that's what it was. It was maybe 20, 25 feet high, kind of like a tunnel covered with grass.

TODD: So we've just driven around once.

ROBERT: And it took, I don't know, about 10-15 minutes to get all the way around.

TODD: Now imagine doing that 78,000 times a second, and you're a proton. So ...

ROBERT: I have never been a proton, but this does sound fast. And because this is a collider, the idea here would be to have the proton collide or bump into something with such force and such violence that for one instant, it gets very hot—hotter than the center of the Sun, as hot as it got near the instant of creation. And that's why this is called a super collider.

ROBERT: The universe one day [popping sound] was there.

TODD: Right.

ROBERT: You can't get before [popping sound], right? That's the mystery line.

TODD: No. And that's—that's what physicists call a "singularity." Everything breaks down. In principle, unless you're God, you can't look behind that because time doesn't even exist. Time ceases to have meaning then.

ROBERT: So you want to tiptoe right up to the beginning. You can't get to the actual beginning, but to the first insta-insta-insta-instant after the beginning.

TODD: Right. We have a pretty good idea of how the universe looked up to a few seconds after the big bang. And what we're doing here is we're getting down into thousandths of a second after the big bang.

ROBERT: We're in a huge, empty room.

TODD: Roughly the size of a blimp hangar.

ROBERT: A blimp hangar.

TODD: A small blimp.

ROBERT: And we're at one of the collision points right now, right?

TODD: One of the collision points right now is only about 45 or 50 feet that way.

ROBERT: That's the place in the collider where they expect to see these smash-ups between two protons. And it's at these points you should get, just for an instant, the heat and the debris and the chaos that's kind of like what the universe was like at the very beginning of time.

TODD: This is the closest to the beginning of the universe you'll ever get.

ROBERT: [laughs]

TODD: Give me a football and you can make a pass into the early universe.

ROBERT: There's a kind of a funny sense, like, of Eden that physicists have about the very first instance of the universe. Do you think that the beginning was more beautiful than now? I mean, now is pretty nice, but for some reason, I notice that people who do what you do love the beginning. Why is that?

TODD: They love the questions. We can explain in a physical sense using our little mathematical equations almost everything that we see now. What we try and do is we try and smash our rocks hard enough to get some glimpse of what happened then because that's the untold story.

ROBERT: In the beginning, there was a kind of simple beauty. Very simple. So one of the motivating thoughts behind all these questions is, "Can I see it before it got complicated?" Is that a part of this?

TODD: That's a deep part of it. The further back you go, you hope the simpler the explanations become, the more beautiful in some sense. The modern world is ruled by complexity and chaos, the interactions of billions and billions of particles ending up in this conversation among other things. And none of it is really predictable because it's very—it's complexity at its finest. So we're looking for the simple origins of things. And then you get the, in some sense, being cast out of Eden by having all of those simple things coming up and creating very, very complex situations.

ROBERT: The world we have now has so many elements and elementary particles and rules and forces. It's messy. That's now. Then was just nicer.

JAD: Moving right along, here's a story about a guy who's, like these physicists, trying to move backwards to a simpler time. And his trajectory is not without its collisions, too. He's not a physicist, though he thinks about physics. He's an artist, a painter. Sells paintings for thousands and thousands of dollars, but you might say that David McDermott's greatest work of art is himself, his obsessive devotion to living as if the present never happened. It's like standing at the shore and trying to keep the tide from coming in. It's impossible. But if you do it fiercely enough, it's also a little heroic. Swedish producer Marcus Lindeen visited David McDermott at his 19th century home in Ireland.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Walking into David McDermott's house is like stepping into an old photograph.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Here, come in. I can't get warm.

MARCUS LINDEEN: We start in front of the fireplace.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: A fire heat will get you warm very quickly.

MARCUS LINDEEN: David wears a green flannel dressing gown, a white nightcap and a fox fur around his neck. He sort of looks like a small old lady.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: When I sit and look into my fire, I can feel all the people that went before me and had their fires. That's the same fire that the earliest of human beings were looking at. Most people do not need to live in the present. Most people don't need to live in the present. Everybody doesn't need to live in the present. Through living in the past, I find secrets.

MARCUS LINDEEN: I'm here to learn his secrets.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Great things. Useful, really good things.

MARCUS LINDEEN: He shows me one of them.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Well, for example, here's the chamber pot.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Next to the bed.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Yeah.

MARCUS LINDEEN: A blue porcelain bedpan.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: That's where the urine is, right? Through peeing through the night.

MARCUS LINDEEN: He lifts the lid off and shows me his pee from last night.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Most people hold their urine through the night, or they break their sleep and they have to get up and pass through the house to get to an electrified bathroom. By the time they get back to bed, they've completely broken their sleep patterns. You can get out of your bed, you pee and you go back in your bed. But it's still enough time to stay in your dream.

MARCUS LINDEEN: He takes me to the bathroom to empty the bedpan.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I mean, here's a bit of something new. There's very few modern things. I mean, here's something modern. Here's a bit of plastic: this cap on the toothpaste. See, because I was gonna throw that away just to show you. See, so I should remove the plastic cap and I'll throw that away.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Okay.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Even though the toothpaste will dry at the top, you see?

MARCUS LINDEEN: That is what you sacrifice: dry toothpaste.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Yes.

MARCUS LINDEEN: For the realistic feeling.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: To get rid of that cap.

MARCUS LINDEEN: But how do you cope? This project seems so huge. It goes into so, so many details, those small details like the toothpaste cap being in plaster.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: It does. But the past was not put together by one person. It wasn't put together by one person. And I am in a position of having to cover all areas. And you think it's easy to put that 19th century world back together? Well, it's not at all. It's very, very difficult because there's no one around any—any longer who can do anything. I'm saying the past is so rich and so wealthy. Think that every year—1918—think every year has music, manners, science, magic, culture, architecture. Every year has them. And the contemporary people want to create more? They can't even deal with what they have.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Are we going to the kitchen?

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Yeah.

MARCUS LINDEEN: When he moved here a couple of years ago, he replaced everything new with something old.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: So you having fun? Now this was a whole modern kitchen, and I ripped this out.

MARCUS LINDEEN: He even had the newly-renovated kitchen torn out ...

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Because I ripped all the modern out.

MARCUS LINDEEN: ... because it was too modern.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And there was a modern floor. I ripped the modern floor up, and I found the old floor. But there used to be a wall here. And the door was ...

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I made a conscious decision when I was 13 years old, and I decided that I would never be able to compete in the modern world. I listened to my teachers at the school, and they explained what the modern world was about and they told us that you had to constantly keep up with the moment, keep up with the moment, keep up with the moment, or you would be destroyed by the society. And I thought to myself, "Well, I'll never be able to compete."

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I'm still cleaning up. Oh, I'm gonna squeeze you some orange juice.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And so I thought, "Well, I'll go backwards. I'll talk to all the old people. I'll learn everything about the past and I'll go backwards. And I was already interested in the past. I loved history, and I was very interested in what had come before. I looked at the photograph—the old photographs of my family, and I thought these are the same people but what a different world. And I used to call the past—when I was younger, I used to call it "The place."

MARCUS LINDEEN: Really?

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I called it the place. And I would say, "I'm going to the place." And to me, the place was the same as this world, but everything was—was good.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Eventually, David stopped playing with kids his own age, and instead stood outside beer halls and hair salons and talked to old people.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Because there was a strange feeling I had when I was around these very old people. I felt like they knew something that I didn't know. I should tell you something else that is very interesting, which has to do with homosexuality, and that is that I didn't see it in the world that I grew up in. And I thought that homosexuality was something that didn't exist anymore. I thought that it was something from the past, and it—and a lot of the books were medical books. It was all about treating it like it was a disease, so I thought it was some old disease that I had, you know, that was surfacing. And I kept it a secret. I kept it a secret for years.

MARCUS LINDEEN: David opens up a closet and shows me his old costumes and party dresses from his younger days in New York.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: See, this is a shirt from the 18th century, and it's the exact same shirt that I just saw in a museum that belonged to Lord Byron. And this is so old that it's evaporated. It's just evaporated.

MARCUS LINDEEN: In the 1980s, he and his partner Peter were known in the art world as "The Time Travelers."

MARCUS LINDEEN: Did you ever meet Andy Warhol?

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I knew him.

MARCUS LINDEEN: What was he like?

DAVID MCDERMOTT: He was a queen.

MARCUS LINDEEN: At one point, they were leading a group of 20 artists trying to recapture life in the 1920s.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: We had horses. In Brooklyn, we kept horses, we had carriages. We were riding all upstate on the roads with these mad horse carriages. That was something! That was unbelievable!

MARCUS LINDEEN: Now it's only him.

[phone ringing]

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Hello, hello? Well, oh, it's me. And I'm sorry. And I'm waiting for this money to come in. You're not desperate, are you?

MARCUS LINDEEN: David owes someone money.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Okay. Bye!

MARCUS LINDEEN: And paying him presents sort of a problem, an unhappy collision between past and present.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Let's not talk because we'll never get there otherwise, all right?

MARCUS LINDEEN: He refuses to use credit or the internet, so he has to go to the bank to withdraw the cash in person. So we bike. David has lent me an old 19th-century bike without any brakes. He bikes fast through the busy traffic streets of Dublin, and I end up far behind him. We catch up later in the bank teller's line.

MARCUS LINDEEN: So what was the rush about? You have to withdraw money?

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Yes. I have to come to the bank to withdraw money when I need it because I insist on doing the banking old-fashioned.

MARCUS LINDEEN: But don't you feel frustrated now when you're, like, right in the middle of a modern bank with a television going on, and all this modern things surrounding us?

DAVID MCDERMOTT: No, it's just the way that you might have a nightmare. Yeah, this is—this is a nightmare.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Leaving David's apartment, going to the bank and then returning is a little disorienting, like stepping in and out of a time capsule. Safe and warm in his bedroom, he puts more coal on the fire and we sit down next to each other on the bed.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And I won't make it right now. Here, take that off the bed. So in terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I'm not talking to you about actual time—time travel. I'm trying to talk in terms of practical terms that everyone can participate in this. I call it time experimentation.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Anyone, he claims, can choose their period in history, like watching a Merchant Ivory film and then stepping in.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: In order to travel in time, we have to first accept the principle that time is here, has always been here and always will be here. In other words, this moment in time that we're experiencing has always been here and always will be, that this moment in time, as you're listening now on the radio on the—as my voice comes across a wireless, this is a permanent fixture of the universe, that I've always spoken on the radio and I always will speak on the radio and you will always be listening, and you always have been listening.

MARCUS LINDEEN: But, but ...

DAVID MCDERMOTT: Do you understand that concept? Do you understand the concept?

MARCUS LINDEEN: I try to explain to him that I do understand his idea—but only in theory. To me, time is linear. It just is. There is a past, a present and a future. And you can't jump in between. But David says that way of thinking is a trap.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: It's basically a death trap. And you will die.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I've loved having you here. I'm having so much fun.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Good.

MARCUS LINDEEN: We're in the library. The bookshelves are full of dusty, yellowed books.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: This is an article.

MARCUS LINDEEN: Old documents and sepia photos. On one of the shelves sits an old replica of a royal crown.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: This is probably something medieval.

MARCUS LINDEEN: With red velvet and jewels on the side. David tries it on.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: I can transform reality in the world. This house and my manner with you, I am seducing you into the past. What do you think?

MARCUS LINDEEN: I think it's—I think it's super interesting.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: We could be having so much fun in this world, you know, instead of the stupid world we're living in.

JAD: Thanks to Swedish producer Marcus Lindeen. If you'd like to see pictures of David McDermott's artwork, check our website, Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: Hello, this is Abby Lone from Los Angeles, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad here with Robert Krulwich. Today on Radiolab, stories and conversations about people who are defying time. Swimming upstream in the river of time, you might say. And there's an extreme group of people who say there's no such thing as time, who deny it completely. We heard from one such person before the break. Here he is again.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: This moment in time that we're experiencing has always been here and always will be. That this moment in time as you're listening now on the radio, this is a permanent fixture of the universe.

JAD: That is David McDermott, he's an artist—an eccentric one at that. So he's kind of easy to write off.

ROBERT: Well, I don't—you don't have to write him off because let me write him back on. Very prominent physicist, Brian Greene, for example, professor of mathematics at Columbia, author of many, many big fat books about this kind of stuff, he agrees with him.

BRIAN GREENE: Well, here's the thing. Many of us who have thought about this have come to the conclusion that indeed, the time that we seem to experience as a continuous flow is actually not a flow at all.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: In other words, I've always spoken on the radio and I always will speak on the radio.

BRIAN GREENE: Each moment just exists ...

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And you will always be listening.

BRIAN GREENE: ... eternally, if you will.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: And you always have been listening.

BRIAN GREENE: It's not that the moment comes to life at one moment in time that we call the present and then somehow drifts away into the past, every moment is and is forever.

DAVID MCDERMOTT: But do you understand that concept? Do you understand the concept?

ROBERT: That's too weird.

BRIAN GREENE: It's a tough idea.

ROBERT: Let me just make it even tougher.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Imagine if I go [inhales], and just hold my breath. That moment which I just thought up, I think, that moment could last in Brian's world forever.

JAD: Have you exhaled yet?

ROBERT: No. [laughs] And the exhale could last forever.

JAD: Somewhere, you're always inhaling, and somewhere you will be forever exhaling.

ROBERT: It's a very, very strange notion.

JAD: But it's a notion that some would argue was shared by a guy I like to call Albert.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, it actually starts when Einstein was a child.

JAD: Michio Kaku's a professor of physics at City College in New York.

MICHIO KAKU: He read a children's book, perhaps the most important children's book ever written in the history of the human race.

JAD: It was a book written by a German guy, Aaron Bernstein, which ...

MICHIO KAKU: ... asked the question: what would it be like to outrace a telegraph message in a telegraph wire?

JAD: In other words, to outrace electricity. But this was only the beginning, because in Einstein's head, he thought of a different question.

MICHIO KAKU: What would it be like to outrace a light beam? What would it look like?

JAD: According to Einstein mythology, while normal boys worried about girls and jobs, Albert obsessed about light for years.

MICHIO KAKU: Then when he was 26 years old, finally, he was about to go berserk. He told his friend Besso that I'm going crazy thinking about this problem for 10 years.

JAD: Bern, Switzerland. That's where he and Besso are living at the time and working as patent clerks. Story goes, one day Einstein's riding the bus to work, and he gazes at the giant clock in the center of town.

MICHIO KAKU: It's a very famous clock. Very pretty clock.

JAD: You've probably seen pictures.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: Well, it's a famous clock.

MICHIO KAKU: Many people have speculated about that clock, but we found the letter.

JAD: A letter, again, to his friend Besso.

MICHIO KAKU: We found the letter saying that yes, he was moving away from that famous clock tower in Bern, Switzerland ...

JAD: Putt-putting past bicyclists, pedestrians, and away from that big Bern clock whose insistent ticking seemed to rule the world below. And then he had a thought: how would that clock look if his little bus suddenly zoomed off at the speed of light?

MICHIO KAKU: He said, "Now wait a minute. If this bus is traveling at the speed of light, then light from the clock will never reach me."

JAD: Meaning the light from all the subsequent ticks on that clock would never catch up to his eyeballs.

MICHIO KAKU: Therefore, the clock will be at rest. The clock will be stationary ...

JAD: ... forever. But strangely, his pocket watch on his person, if he were to look at that it would be ticking just fine.

MICHIO KAKU: And then he said, quote, "A storm broke in my mind." These are his exact words: "A storm broke in my mind." And the very next day, he went to his friend Besso and says, "I have solved everything."

JAD: And what he said to his friend Besso, it's a very simple but radical idea.

MICHIO KAKU: Time beats at different rates depending upon how fast you move.

JAD: If you go fast, your time slows down. Not just your clock, but your time, your brain, everything about you slows. And they've proven this. They've put clocks in airplanes, flown the airplanes around the world, had a clock on the ground. When the airplane decelerated and landed and they compared the two clocks, they were different. A little different, but they were different. Now theoretically, the difference could be thousands of years depending on how fast the plane was traveling. Which raises a paradox: how can you have two completely different times, and both of them—according to Einstein—are equally true?

ROBERT: Very, very puzzling. Because if you have a time that's true for you ...

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: ... and I have a time that's true for me ...

JAD: And they're different.

ROBERT: ... and they're different. Then what—what is it? What does time—what time do we have in common?

JAD: Einstein struggled with this very question for many, many years. And toward the end of his life, according to Michio Kaku, he dropped a hint for how he might have resolved it in his mind. And it was at the funeral of his best friend Besso.

MICHIO KAKU: Well, when Besso died, Einstein gave perhaps one of the most moving eulogies. He said, "Time is an illusion. That we who know, know there is no distinction between the past, the present and the future." It's a very moving quote, and he's essentially saying that, in some sense, Besso will live forever. Ever since then, we physicists have been trying to figure out what did he mean by that?

ROBERT: Maybe Albert Einstein was mourning his friend here and just didn't want him dead, and this was just poetry.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But more likely, it was—it was his guess about the nature of time, how to handle the contradiction of two very different moments, past moments, present moments. Brian Greene deals with this in his book, Fabric of the Cosmos.

BRIAN GREENE: The moments are. They just exist, and somehow it's the human mind in each moment that makes each moment seem real. December 31, 1999, I was at a New Year's party. And according to this way of thinking, that I'll always be at that New Year's party because that moment is. It exists. It's not that it somehow goes away. My mind seems to organize things into moments that are gone and moments that have yet to be. But I think that's my mind organizing things. I don't think that's how the universe is put together. The moments just are.

ROBERT: But look where that leaves us. That leaves us with everything that you've done in your life exists already.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Everything.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Your beginning, your middle and your end.

BRIAN GREENE: Every moment of time is out there.

ROBERT: You're dead somewhere. You're almost dead somewhere.

BRIAN GREENE: Yes, there's no special now.

ROBERT: You're saying to me that there is no time as I understand it. No time. Every moment of your life is already there eternally frozen. Every moment of my life is frozen. Every moment of my children's life is frozen, and every moment of my great, great, great, great grandchildren's lives are already there and frozen. And so the universe is a vast collection of ...

BRIAN GREENE: Nows.

ROBERT: Nows.

BRIAN GREENE: That's right.

ROBERT: That's ridiculous. No, that is just ridiculous. [laughs] It just seems—first of all, it denies so many things. It denies the poetry of change. Don't you see what's terribly unsatisfying about that? That means you don't have any options.

BRIAN GREENE: Yeah, free will is a very, very difficult question to answer for a physicist.

ROBERT: Are you happy with this?

BRIAN GREENE: In terms of free will? I'm very—free will's a very troubling issue.

ROBERT: Well, you choose tonight to go to the movies, and I say, "Let's go to see Gone With the Wind," and you say, "No, let's go see Planet Zantar Attack of the Return of the Devils of the She-Devils." Don't you like to think that you're—that you have a real choice there?

BRIAN GREENE: I'd love to think it. Do I know for a fact that the thought and the impression of free will is really real? No, I don't know that. In my heart, I tell you, I don't really know that. I suspect it's real because it feels so real. But there are so many things about the universe that we thought were real until we learned that they weren't.

ROBERT: But what I want to know about the future is that I'm in some control of it.

BRIAN GREENE: Yeah, I understand.

ROBERT: I want to fall in love because I want to fall in love. I want to step across the sidewalk in front of that car because I want to commit suicide, or whatever it is I want to do. And I don't want to have you or your pointy-headed friends telling me that it's already there, and I'm going to somehow move from instant to instant all pre-planned. Then the poetry disappears, then the magic disappears, and then most important of all, my command of myself disappears.

BRIAN GREENE: Let me give you an alternative that reinstates some of the poetry, some of the free will that you're longing for. And I long for the same thing.

ROBERT: You don't.

BRIAN GREENE: I do. Absolutely do. And I feel like I have free will. I have—I feel like I have the ability to choose my next word. I feel like that can do that. Do I really have that freedom? I don't know. I think I do, and perhaps that's enough. Just the illusion of the freedom. But anyway, let me paint a alternative but highly-related scenario. In quantum theory, some have suggested the so-called many-worlds interpretation, that the universe is not a single entity. There are many universes. We call them parallel universes. Each of the choices that you make is borne out in one of these copies.

ROBERT: Right. I'll give it to you. We're in a restaurant. I am sitting there, and it's time for dessert. The waiter approaches and he says, "Would you like chocolate ice cream or vanilla?" I think this over. If I choose vanilla, from then on I'm in the ...

BRIAN GREENE: Vanilla universe, yes.

ROBERT: But if I choose chocolate, I'm in the chocolate universe.

BRIAN GREENE: Yes.

ROBERT: So all the consequences that flow from my vanilla—I say "Vanilla," and then somebody named Banilla happens to come in and I fall in love with Banilla and I marry Banilla, we have our lovely Banillitos. But if I choose chocolate, I go into a mocha thing and I suddenly am living in the Caribbean.

BRIAN GREENE: Right.

ROBERT: All right, so this is a real divider for me. Don't you see that this is, like, dumb? I mean, like, it's an easy ...

BRIAN GREENE: When you say "dumb," can you just be more precise? Because there are many criticisms of this picture, but I want to know which one you have in mind.

ROBERT: Well, the reason I think it's dumb is because it's, like, a pat solution. Like, you say, "Okay, since I can't get you free will the old way, what I'll do is I'll give you a lot of universes so you can have it all, baby. You can have the chocolate universe, you can have the vanilla universe."

BRIAN GREENE: No, a key thing is—a key thing is this proposal, which was put forward in about 1957 by a guy named Hugh Everett and then developed by many people, Bryce DeWitt and so on, was not put forward in order to restore anything to do with free will. These physicists, very, very high-powered creative physicists, were studying quantum mechanics. And they came to a puzzle. If quantum theory says there's a 30 percent chance you're gonna pick the vanilla ice cream, and say a 30 percent chance that you're gonna pick the chocolate ice cream, and say, a 40 percent chance that you're gonna pick pistachio, and yet, when we look at the world and we look at what you do, you do seem to choose one or the other, where do the other possibilities that quantum theory said could happen, where do they go? Do they just disappear? Did they ...?

ROBERT: Yeah, they disappear.

BRIAN GREENE: Well, that is very hard to realize in the actual structure of quantum theory itself.

ROBERT: You mean that physicists, when they order chocolate, do they then think? "Hmm, had I chosen vanilla my whole life could have been different?"

BRIAN GREENE: No, they don't think that. They say to themselves—at least the fellas that believe, say, "Hmm, I chose vanilla in this world, but there's another version of me that's now eating chocolate."

ROBERT: Huh. You guys are very weird. [laughs]

ROBERT: Now to be fair to Brian, at a quantum restaurant, at a kosher quantum restaurant that's really quantum ...

MICHIO KAKU: Are they really such things?

ROBERT: Well, for the purpose of this argument there will be.

MICHIO KAKU: Okay.

ROBERT: Waiters will deliver you closed lids of ice cream, and they won't tell you whether there's chocolate or vanilla. "They're both in there," they'll say mysteriously. And you say, "I think I'll have chocolate." Chocolate pops into existence, and vanilla goes away. So that's why quantum scientists wonder where things went because there's a mystery here. But that's another story.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I'm sure your head is spinning.

MICHIO KAKU: Yes. It is spinning. My head is spinning.

JAD: Do you feel—it sometimes seems that Einstein was the point at which physics broke away from common sense. Everything you've just told me is utterly fascinating, and at the same time utterly confusing. How do you live your life with knowing—do you compartmentalize everything that you study in this office?

MICHIO KAKU: Well, you know, late at night I think about these things. And it gives you the willies. I do think about the fact that there's an alternate me out there, a clone of me, except I chose totally different life paths. And yeah, I can write down the equations, the equations for these alternate universes where I exist. In another universe, perhaps Elvis Presley is still alive. I get asked that question: is Elvis Presley alive in one of these universes? At that point, I have to stop. I have to stop.

JAD: If this strikes us as a little too weird that there could be a bazillion Michios out there in the world in various universes doing various things all at once. One of them could be talking to me, but one of them could be talking simultaneously to Elvis.

ROBERT: One of them might be impersonating Elvis because remember, in an infinite number of universes, you can do an infinite number of things.

JAD: But we should keep in mind, this is still just speculation. And as particle physicist, Lisa Randall likes to say ...

LISA RANDALL: I mean, there's a big difference between physics and philosophy. You let that go away, you've sort of lost the great thing that is there in terms of physics, which is the ability to actually make testable predictions about the world.

ROBERT: But wait a second. If she wants a testable prediction about the world, there have been experiments and real science experiments. I'm thinking of one that was done in 1960 and was repeated over and over since then, that examined free will and time in a very interesting way. And by the way, this experiment created an uproar, especially among philosophers, because it's kind of a doozy. It involves finger wiggling. So can I have a little mood music, please?

[MUSIC]

ROBERT: These scientists invited a group of people to come to the lab and sit down and have their brains monitored. And then according to the neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, they turned to their subjects ...

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: And they said, "At anytime you wish, wiggle your finger."

JAD: That sounds easy enough.

ROBERT: Remember, by the way, that to wiggle your finger takes two steps. First, you have to decide to wiggle, then you wiggle. So you have to think it before you do it.

JAD: Which takes what, like, a tenth of or a millionth of a second or something?

ROBERT: Yeah, a very short time. So you sit there and you think, "Okay, now I'm gonna wiggle." However, when they did this experiment and they looked back at the graphs of all the brains of the people who did this ...

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: What they found was your sensation that you asked your fiddle to—your finger to wiggle, your sensation, your will, came a second after the brain kicked in.

ROBERT: If you looked at my brain waves when I was wiggling my finger, Jad, here's what you'd see. First, you'd see my brain getting ready to wiggle. There's a spike or a blip as Ramachandran would say. That's my brain getting ready. And then second, you'd get a second spike showing the wiggle. So there's a blip for getting ready, yeah. And there's a blip for wiggle. Now logic would tell you the way this should go is first, I decide to wiggle then my brain gets ready and then my brain wiggles, right? But when they looked, what actually happens is, before I decide to wiggle—before—my brain mysteriously is already getting ready.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Even though you think you're willing the brain to do something, it's your brain that's willing you to will. It's thinking ahead of you, and then your so-called thinking is a post-hoc rationalization.

ROBERT: So I don't have any free will.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: You don't have any free will. That was the implication that the philosophers came up with.

ROBERT: But why can't you just say that the brain is—does a little bit of stuff before you're aware of it? It just always does. It just takes three-quarters of a second to get going.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: This is fine for everything except the awareness of willing because will, by its very nature, is a feeling that you are doing it.

ROBERT: So imagine, says Dr. Ramachandran, that you could—it hasn't happened yet, but you could see your brain waves in real time on a screen right in front of you.

JAD: In real time.

ROBERT: Yes.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Now the question is, "What's gonna happen?" Okay. I say, "Look, I want you to move your finger any time you choose in the next three minutes."

ROBERT: So you're sitting there, you know, thinking about nothing in particular. Hmm, hmm, wiggle.

JAD: Whoa. I thought the wiggle was gonna be just preceded by the blip, but it was like a whole second before that.

ROBERT: Yeah. No, your brain is way ahead of you on this thing. Just listen to this again because it's a long pause. Hmm, hmm, wiggle.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: Then you say, "That blip is controlling me! Where the hell is free will? Even a simple thing like moving my finger I can't do on my own without a blip telling me ahead of time." You're either going to say the blip's controlling me, or you're gonna say the blip has ESP. But this gives you an experimental handle on something as elusive as free will.

ROBERT: Time here betrays free will because your brain acted ahead of your decision to act. You have no idea who's acting. It's just one of those weird—I don't think they've ever resolved this either.

JAD: I don't know. Look, this [tapping pen on table], that's me very much in control of the pen in my hand beating it on the table. I just did that.

ROBERT: Yeah, but if I were to put a graph in front of you showing you your brain, and there was a piece of your brain that anticipated that? And then what would you say?

JAD: I would say that they're wrong, I guess? I don't know.

ROBERT: [laughs] If we—because we have to take a break now—if we wiggle our fingers goodbye, we would think that we were—we would think that it was our choice to wiggle, but the real question we should ask is, "Who's wiggling?"

[LISTENER: This is Dale Richards in Kent, Ohio. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad here with Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. We've been looking at the concept of time this hour—fighting against it, defying it and denying it. Our last story, however, is about making peace with our place in the history of time. It comes to us from producer Ben Adair, and it unfolds in a very, very old place: the Mojave Desert.

BEN ADAIR: These are old mining roads. Once upon a time, hopeful men and women looked for outcroppings of quartz, iron, copper. And when they found them—this was public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM—they filed a claim and dug. Follow EP 15, and you'll see the signs for the Burro Schmidt Tunnel. Between the years 1906 and 1938, a lone miner dug and blasted a 2,087-foot hole straight through a granite mountain. His name was Burro Schmidt, and he first filed this claim in 1904. Today, David Ayers digs here. He gives tours of Burro's tunnel. He says miners still roam these hills.

DAVID AYERS: And the way he got his name "Burro" Schmidt, he always had two burros with him, Jack and Jenny. And, of course, once they died, Burro didn't waste anything, so we ate them.

BEN: [laughs]

DAVID AYERS: And Burro died in 1954. They had his funeral right in front of the tunnel entrance. And in 1963, Toni and her husband came up. For the next 40 years, she was up here. And Toni died up here on her bed, inside her house like she wanted to at the age of 95.

BEN: Wow.

DAVID AYERS: That old woman is legendary. She was scared of nothing. When she died up here, she didn't die alone. I was by her side, and her granddaughter from Vermont was here too. But she never backed down from a fight. There was once when she was 75, she had a fistfight with a guy right in front of her house, and she won the fight. She cheated, but she won the fight.

BEN: What did she do?

DAVID AYERS: She had a role in nickels in her fist. But no, she never backed down from any fight.

BEN: How long do you think you're gonna stay up here?

DAVID AYERS: I gotta be out the 29th of this month.

BEN: Really?

DAVID AYERS: Yeah. The BLM's gonna take over the place and run it. They're gonna save Burro's cabin, they're gonna save Toni's house over there. Everything else is gonna be bulldozed and cleared out, which is unfortunate because they're gonna change the way history looks. This is basically the camp that an old woman built up. It's not supposed to be Disneyland. If you want Disneyland, that's in Anaheim. If you want a desert camp, this is just the way some of them look.

BEN: Hmm. So this has been going on for a long time, this BLM stuff?

DAVID AYERS: Yeah, quite a while. Toni, since she lived here for so long, they didn't bother her. They just basically waited for her to die. She expected me to save the place. And I was—I promised her that she would die on her bed up here like she wanted to. I kept that promise. The second promise, I wasn't able to keep up. You know, I tried. In fact, a lot of people tried.

BEN: You're all really close, huh?

DAVID AYERS: Geez, I'm never gonna stop missing her. Never. You know, she was—there was no one else like her.

BEN: David Ayers is gone now, but before he left, he looked over his ramshackle camp and told me, "Don't be sad. The days of the desert rat have already passed. What's here is just a corpse." People who spend time in the Mojave start thinking differently about space. Huge stretches of land without a house, a telephone pole or high tension wire. You can close your eyes while sliding between mountain ranges at 80 or 100 miles an hour.

BEN: "I'd love to drive Death Valley in a really fast car," a friend of mine said. "A really, really fast car." Death Valley is probably the best-known part of the Mojave Desert. Dropping down onto the valley floor from the west, you see huge salt flats below you, reddish-brown mountains peak in the distance, and between them, huge washes of boulder, rubble, and sand flow into Death Valley like a dam bursting in extreme slow motion.

BEN: It rains rarely in Death Valley. When I was there, a light drizzle caused a flash flood in Mosaic Canyon, where sculpted marble walls drop down hundreds of feet to a teeny, tiny stream bed. The stream fans out here, and Mosaic Canyon is a temple of reds and whites, arcing domes and voluptuous curves. There it sinks down deep into the rock, making hard stone look supple.

BEN: Death Valley exists in geologic time. The oldest rocks at Badwater are 1.8 billion years old. Standing here watching the stream flow, I started thinking about that Mars Rover. I thought about my girlfriend, my family and politics. Mosaic Canyon sinks a tiny bit deeper each year. A hundred human empires will rise and fall in the time it takes Death Valley to notice our passing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marta Becket: The masquerade is an event of illusion held once each year to serve as a vacation from ourselves, a relief from the reality of another year.]

BEN: Highway 190 bisects Death Valley. East of the park, it ends in Death Valley Junction, a former ghost town revived 36 years ago when Marta Becket reopened the Amargosa Opera House. This is the second season of her show, The Masquerade.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marta Becket: [singing] I always felt that I should be someone else other than me. I'm so bored with the role I play, I need to escape for a day.]

BEN: Marta Becket is a dancer. She spent the first half of her life on stage in New York. In her early 40s, she found this abandoned theater. She patched the roof, painted an audience on the walls, sewed the curtains, the costumes, wrote the script and choreographed the dance. Saturday nights sell out.

MARTA BECKET: Well, there are like many musicals, if you want to call them. The one we did before this was called The Dollmaker, about a doll shop you can go and buy the perfect companion for life and not have to bother with a real one. It was quite controversial. I made a few enemies out of it.

BEN: Like The Dollmaker, The Masquerade asks questions about identity: who we want to be versus who we actually are. And it sort of summarizes why a lot of people move out to the desert. There's a freedom here.

MARTA BECKET: In New York, it's like trying to paint on a canvas that's already painted on. Out here, it's an empty canvas for my mind to envision whatever I want to create. In the beginning, people thought I was kind of eccentric. Then they saw that I was a success, and that really snapped it, and now—now they like me. I'm not a weirdo.

BEN: Do you ever hear from your friends back home?

MARTA BECKET: Oh, yes. Yeah.

BEN: What do they say?

MARTA BECKET: They think it's great. They thought I was crazy when I moved out here. Now they think it's great.

BEN: Do they come visit you?

MARTA BECKET: Yeah. Once a year.

BEN: Nobody really knows who was first, though anybody can tell you why. As city real estate spiraled out of control, artists, musicians and old hippies have migrated here, the extreme south end of the Mojave Desert. Tucked away around Pioneer Town, Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, are free spirits living off their art.

BEN: Of course, the land grab is the cynic's point of view, and it's easy to feel jaded around young kids singing and old men drumming. Urban sophistication is when you refuse a stranger's hug or laugh, no questions asked. But those who've dropped their cynicism will tell you this is a place of optimism and hope. And it's genuine. The woman cooking brought extra burgers to share, the climbers are back with their instruments, looking for accompaniment. No experience necessary. The Indians sing because it feels good. You can feel good too, if you want. It's your choice.

SONNY TWO FEATHERS: My name is Sonny Two Feathers. I'm 27 years old, and I'm from Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada.

BEN: Describe for me what we're looking at right here, and tell me how you see that versus maybe how other people see it.

SONNY TWO FEATHERS: Well, right now what I'm looking at is a beautiful desert paradise with boulders that have symbols of hands and symbols of people, of animals and spirits. I see beautiful trees in front of me. Tall, reaching for the sky, reaching to pray up to the Creator. And it looks all glimmering in the moonlight. When people are out here, they—all their stress and worries and their problems go away, their anxieties, fear just totally leaves them when they come out here. But it's just so hard with the society now. We don't know how to escape this control that they have over us. But when we're here, the moment it's just happy, and everything blows away with the wind.

SINGER-SONGWRITER: [singing] Some was bad and some was good, some just did the best they could. Some have even tried to ease my troubled mind. And I can't help but wonder where I'm bound, where I'm bound. Where I'm bound, where I'm bound.

BEN: In 1989, a sculptor named Noah Purifoy bought a ranch on the flats north of Yucca Valley. Purifoy's probably best known for founding the Watts Towers Arts Center in 1964, but he also made huge assemblage sculptures from lost and found desert objects. Some are serious, but most are whimsical. All are in pretty bad shape. His first few years out here, Purifoy fought the elements, but later he incorporated their effects. A sculpture is never done, he surmised. After he built it, the weather continued the process. I went out to talk to Purifoy, but I was a day late. When I got there, I phoned his assistant and she told me that he'd passed away the morning before. She was devastated. After hanging up, I walked around his garden. I wandered down a sculpture built like a hallway filled with old calculators, cash registers and boards with rusty nails sticking out.

BEN: I stood there thinking about this man who had just died, and I started thinking about those old miners, their desert way of life. I thought about Marta Becket singing her operas for 36 years, and I thought about Death Valley, the sense of time there that threatens to make everything we do here absolutely irrelevant. Everything.

BEN: I thought about these sculptures decaying, the miners disappearing, all the artists dying and every last one of us, the entire human race, turning the dust blowing around the Mojave Desert in the wind. Noah Purifoy once said that after he finished his sculptures, they take on a life of their own. I'm gonna hope he's right about that. I really need to believe it's true.

JAD: Ben Adair is a producer for KPCC radio, and he has his own show out in California called Pacific Drift.

ROBERT: And we would be very curious to hear what you think of our show. We have an email address: Radiolab@wnyc.org. Radiolab is one word.

JAD: And anything you heard you can hear again at Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And we are signing off.

CINDY FANELLI: This is an English ...

CINDY FANELLI: The carriage clocks are ...

CINDY FANELLI: This is late 1800s.

CINDY FANELLI: This is a cuckoo clock, and it will cuckoo and then play a little song for you.

CINDY FANELLI: This program was produced by Jad Abumrad and Ellen Horne. Production support by Robert Krulwich, Sally Herships, Rob Krieger, David Martin, Amy O'Leary, Sarah Pellegrini, Michael Shelley and Anne Hepperman. Special thanks to Keith Scott, Ramsey Alan, Valerie Shakespeare and I'm Cindy Fanelli of Fanelli Antique Timepieces. Time can be expensive. The most valuable time is the time we spend on each other.

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