[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 you take 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.

 

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