[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: You know this music. Trust me, you've heard it your entire life. The reason you can't recognize it now is because the composer, born in 1770, intended for this moment, the one you're hearing, to last two seconds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony]

JAD: Like that. However, had he been a whale, Beethoven might have written his Ninth Symphony this way.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony slowed down]

JAD: Changes that for us would take an instant would transpire over minutes, and a movement might last six hours. That's, in fact, what this is, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony digitally stretched from its normal 60-some odd minutes to last an entire day, 24 hours. And if you sit for the entire 24 hour duration of the piece, as people do from time to time, you realize that this music is not simply slower—the slowness unlocks something in the original. Maybe it was there all along and we couldn't hear it. But play with the meter—music is mostly about meter, after all—then the music has a different story to tell, a secret perhaps, locked up inside the routine. Change the routine, you make new discoveries. That's what we'll do this hour. We'll look at time so closely we'll discover new things about it.

JAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad. My guest tonight for the next hour to help me wrestle with time is the science correspondent Robert Krulwich of ABC News, and NOVA, and Nightline. How are you sir?

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm very well. I like this bathing in Beethoven thing you've got going on here.

JAD: It's cool, right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Yeah. Actually, at the end of the program, we will be dropping in on a performance that happened recently in San Francisco where people listen to it over the course of an entire day.

ROBERT: A day?

JAD: A day. So where first?

ROBERT: Let's begin with a guy who I think you'll find—well, he thinks very deeply about time. In fact, in a very gentle kind of way you could say he's time obsessed. You've heard of the neurologist Oliver Sacks?

JAD: Sure. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

ROBERT: Yeah, right.

JAD: And Awakenings.

ROBERT: So I was over at his house—this is me actually over at his house right now.

JAD: Key turning.

ROBERT: And he told me this story.

OLIVER SACKS: I don't know whether this is relevant. I had an odd experience some years ago. In fact, in 1993, when I got a message from my publisher, which they had sent out to various of their authors, for their 21st birthday, their jubilee, asking if we would like to select a year from the previous 21 years and write about it. And when I got this message, I thought, "Well, why don't I choose 1972," which was the first of the years. And it's a year which is very vivid and important for me, partly because it was the year in which my mother died, partly it was the year in which I completed Awakenings. And these two events were coupled in some ways.

OLIVER SACKS: I was actually in the car when I got this message. I picked it up on a car phone. And I was driving up to Canada, and I had a tape recorder with me, so I spoke 1972 aloud. And by that time I thought, "Well, why stop? Why don't I do 1973, as well?" By the time ...

ROBERT: How long did '72 take? Did you get to Montreal or were you still ...

OLIVER SACKS: No. '72 probably took about half an hour. By the time I got to the Canadian border I was up to 1987. And I did, in fact, make an extra loop so that I could complete things.

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS: However, it turned out that the most recent years, the late '80s and the '90s, I did not apparently have such detailed memories of, and they seemed subjectively shorter.

ROBERT: So time, I guess we all know this, is a very plastic thing. It's swollen and rich some of the time, and then it's like flaccid and eh other times. But because Oliver is so inquisitive, such an investigator at heart, all his life he's looked inside things. And beginning when he was 10, 11, 12, he wanted to get inside time.

OLIVER SACKS: I had lots of boyish interests. You know, these pre-adolescent interests. They all took a beating when I became an adolescent. But one of them was chemicals, and I had a chemistry laboratory. One of them was photography, and I had a darkroom and cameras. And one of them was plants. And in particular, my mother was very fond of ferns, and the garden was full of ferns.

OLIVER SACKS: I love the way in which the curled up fiddleheads or crosiers of ferns would unfurl, and it was almost as if time was sort of rolled up inside them, as if time itself unfurled. But one couldn't actually see this. They would perhaps take a day or two to do this. And I wanted to see it. It made me think of these Christmas things one would blow—braap—and these paper trumpets, which would unfold. And so I set up my camera on a tripod. And at least in the daytime—I couldn't take pictures at night, I didn't have a flash then—I took a series of pictures every hour or so of the fern and then showed these rapidly by putting them together in a flick book. And this way then, what took a day or two or several hours to happen was compressed into several seconds. So the compression of time, photographically, fascinated me.

JAD: Us, too. If Oliver Sacks can make a baby fern unfurl—Robert, how about this—radio producer Tony Schwartz can do the same thing with his baby niece.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Except in sound.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Here, sped up for your appreciation is Nancy Schwartz from birth to age 12 in two minutes, 12 seconds, exactly.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: [baby crying] La, la, la—here come.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Jack and Jill went up the ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Hill.

TONY SCHWARTZ: To fetch a pail of ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Water.

TONY SCHWARTZ: Jack fell down and broke ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Crown.

TONY SCHWARTZ: And Jill came tumbling ...

NANCY SCHWARTZ: After. Happy birthday, daddy. Happy birthday! Happy birthday to you.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: If you called a toy store up and you say I want a puppy and a whistle and a horn and a hat and a dress and a ballerina costume, that's what you get. But Santa Claus can't bring it, you can cry.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Tony, if the dog likes weeing in the house, if you have to make him house broken, if he makes wee wee in the apartment, have to slap him with a newspaper. Then if he doesn't do it again, he's housebroken.

TONY SCHWARTZ: What do you think of the Russians sending the dog up in the satellite?

NANCY SCHWARTZ: Well, I hope he doesn't get hurt, but if he does I'm sure they'll send up a medical satellite.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: In school, we each had to do a report on some place, and I'm doing a report on Hawaii. And we're taking notes and doing research. This summer we're going camping in the month of July this summer. But for the whole month of July this summer, I'm going to go to Brownie sleepaway camp. It's all girls.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: You'll miss my hair, and it's very special for tonight. It's just the way I wanted: a pageboy with a high top, and that's the way I like it.

NANCY SCHWARTZ: I'm taking guitar lessons, and that's fun. I take drama lessons after school, and that's great. And I've been working on the school newspaper. I might be editor next year. And I've been discovering boys.

ROBERT: You know what that is?

JAD: What's that?

ROBERT: That is if you were a parent, what you've just heard is a parent clock.

JAD: Huh! A parent clock? That's kinda cool.

ROBERT: Because the kid gets older. You can't deny the fact that you must be getting older, too. When your son has hair on his legs.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: I go, "Oh, man. I'm getting old!" But this is true. This is how the whole world works, I think.

JAD: Everything is a clock, I guess.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: By the way, that was "Nancy Grows Up," an audio flipbook recorded and arranged by the great radio producer Tony Schwartz. Thanks to him and to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. And also to you, Mr. Robert Krulwich, for joining me today on our program to talk about time.

JAD: So here's my question: if we've got an example of what you just called a 'parent clock.'

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: You've got other kinds of time like, you know, personal time, getting out of bed time.

ROBERT: Yeah, like, most of existence, really, time was measured by, "Oh, it's lunch time, it's wake up time ..."

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: It's time to milk the cow time. Events or task times.

JAD: Tasks times. How did we get from task and personal time to clock time?

ROBERT: Ah, now that's interesting! Let's go back to the 1800s, and imagine a guy, we'll call him, oh, Zoltan Chaboigon.

JAD: Zoltan Chaboigon?

ROBERT: Yes. Living in Sandusky, Ohio.

JAD: Interesting.

ROBERT: And suppose Zoltan wants to know, you know, what time it is.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: So if Zoltan walked into, say, Bigsby's Tavern and asked ...

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Mr. Bigsby could I trouble you for the time?

1. BIGSBY: It's right in front of you. You see this clock here? It's built by my nephew. Not the smartest boy in the world. It says 33 minutes past the hour.

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Is that right?

1. BIGSBY: Of course it's right!

ROBERT: However, if Zoltan, instead of going into the tavern, had he gone at that exact same moment into the bank building ...

BANK TELLER: How can I help you, sir?

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: I wondered if you could show me the time?

BANK TELLER: Three minutes past the hour.

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Is it right, though?

BANK TELLER: Yes, it's right.

ROBERT: Or at that very same moment, suppose instead of going to the tavern or the bank, he'd gone to the hotel.

HOTEL CLERK: Can I help you?

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Could you tell me the time, please?

HOTEL CLERK: Yes, of course. My timepiece here says ...

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Oh, is that silver?

HOTEL CLERK: Silver style, actually. It's 19 past the hour.

ROBERT: So at the tavern, it's 33 past the hour, at the hotel 19 past, the bank three past, what time is it really in Sandusky? That's the question. The answer is, there was no official time in Sandusky.

JAD: Huh? What do you mean there's no official time in Sandusky?

ROBERT: There wasn't any, not in 1850. The government didn't have a time.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: All there were, were clocks. So in Ohio in the 1850s, you'd have as many times as there were clocks in the town.

JAD: Huh!

ROBERT: So there was no reason, when you think about it, to synchronize. If your clock and my clock were four minutes or ten minutes different in Sandusky in the 1850s, who cares? Until the railroad changed everything. Once the railroad came in, if Zoltan wanted to take, I don't know ...

JAD: How about the 3:03 to Cleveland?

ROBERT: Okay. If he wanted to take the 3:03 to Cleveland, how would he know when it was 3:03?

JAD: Oh, I see where you're going with this.

ROBERT: If you went by the bank's clock, he'd arrive a half hour ahead of time.

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: [sighs]

ROBERT: If he went by the hotel clock, he'd arrive in the nick of time.

TRAIN CONDUCTOR: All aboard!

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Wait, wait, wait ...

ROBERT: And if he went by the tavern's clock ...

ZOLTAN CHABOIGON: Oh, no! Wait!

ROBERT: So for the sake of their business, really, railroads created railroad time and began putting up clocks of their own.

JAD: That makes sense.

ROBERT: And because the railroads were so important, I mean, the tavern would have to get its beer deliveries from the railroad.

JAD: And I guess the banks would have to get their cash from the railroad, and the hotel would have to get their guests from the railroad.

ROBERT: So gradually, railroad time becomes everybody's time.

JAD: So what happened to local time?

ROBERT: Well, local time disappeared.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Yeah. If local time means that when it's noon in Sandusky, the sun is directly over your head, by 1880 that wasn't true anymore.

JAD: Oh.

ROBERT: The railroad had instructed Sandusky that from now on, its noon would be 20 minutes later so it could fit into the railroad schedule.

JAD: Wait, so they moved noon over 20 minutes?

ROBERT: Yeah, and there were protests about this.

PROTESTER #1: I put it to you, ladies and gentleman, who owns noon in Sandusky?

PROTESTERS: We do, we do! Damn railroad!

JAD: So in all seriousness, people fought against this? They rebelled against this?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah.

JAD: They rebelled against the railroad?

ROBERT: Oh, there were time wars in certain towns, where part of the town would go to railroad time, but the other part would determinedly stick with what used to be local times, and they'd have different times in the town.

JAD: Wow! It's almost like it was a personal freedom issue.

ROBERT: Yeah. Because time, in a way, represents your own identity. And they didn't want to give up their identity to the railroad—not at first. But in the end, Sandusky, and then every other town eventually conformed to railroad time, and that is how time became standardized, time became zoned, time became clock referenced. When you ask somebody what time is it, they don't say, you know, "Oh, it's bedtime," or, "It's lunchtime." They don't look up at the sun. They look at a clock, a standard clock. And the railroads did that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Every tick of a clock is time won or lost. Every 60-minute sweep, every 12-hour tour of those relentless hands are turning out carload lots of times.]

JAD: There's an interesting connection to explore here, and it has to do with horses.

ROBERT: Horses?

JAD: Horses. You mentioned railroad companies. It just so happens that the owner of the biggest railroad company, Leland Stanford. You know, as in Stanford University?

ROBERT: Oh, from Stanford University, yeah.

JAD: Right. He was really into speed, and he owned a really fast horse. And the horse's name was Occident.

ROBERT: Occident. I know. I remember that.

JAD: The story goes, this horse was the subject of a gentleman's bet.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Well, there was no gentleman's bet. It's a myth. Stanford, so far as we know, was not a betting man.

JAD: That's Rebecca Solnit. She would know. She wrote a book about this called River of Shadows, And the focus of her book is the solver of the bet—or whatever it was.

REBECCA SOLNIT: It was an argument. There's no evidence that there was money on it.

JAD: In any case, this argument among Stanford and his railroad buddies centered around the following question: when a horse gallops, do all four of its feet leave the ground at once? What do you think?

ROBERT: Hmm! I don't know. I mean, it's not a question that I would, frankly, ever ask anyone, but ...

JAD: Well, at the time it was a big question, because they had no way of knowing because horses moved faster than eyeballs could see.

REBECCA SOLNIT: So Leland Stanford wanted to prove that a horse had all four feet off the ground at one time, and he was recommended to try Muybridge as the photographer to capture this.

JAD: Along comes Edward Muybridge, the photographer. If he could take a picture of the horse at exactly the right instant, you could see whether all four feet were off the ground and solve the bet. Here's the problem: cameras in those days were very slow.

REBECCA SOLNIT: A fast exposure would be maybe a second or several seconds. Muybridge was going to push photography to suddenly be able to capture motion in a 500th of a second. Otherwise, you just got blur.

JAD: Blur. Imagine that first step out of the world of a blur. Muybridge had stretched a wire across the racetrack and attached it to the shutter mechanism on his camera. Occident the horse gallops by, trips the wire which freezes the horse mid-gallop, steals him right out of the flow of time. Except Muybridge doesn't take one photo, he takes 24. See, he placed 24 cameras in a line, one after the other, with 24 tripwires stretching across the racetrack. And the horse tripped every one. 24 frozen, unblurry, running horses.

ROBERT: So what did they see?

JAD: Well, the pictures formed a series of a horse running, and some of those photos showed Occident, yes, with all four feet off the ground.

ROBERT: [laughs] So the camera here unlocks a secret. It lets us see something you could never see before because this camera, essentially, it stops time.

JAD: Exactly. Meanwhile, says Rebecca, Muybridge became fascinated with learning more secrets of time, secrets locked inside basic human movements.

REBECCA SOLNIT: A leap, a splash, a walk, a pirouette.

JAD: Wow, how mundane!

REBECCA SOLNIT: But they're so enchanted when you really pay attention to them.

JAD: Yeah.

REBECCA SOLNIT: Muybridge had photographed rushing water. He was obsessed with water in his landscape pictures. So he obsessively has people pour water, splash water, pour water over themselves, pour pitchers of water, or pour water into glasses, splash water out of basins, bathe in water. And you can see all these droplets frozen in midair.

JAD: There's one particular photo, Robert, where you see a sheet of water suspended in the air, hovering over the splasher kind of like a ghost.

ROBERT: Hmm. Oh, wow!

JAD: Anyhow, take all those frozen moments and line them one after the other and play them back, and you've got flow again. Albeit artificial flow, which we call movies.

ROBERT: Movies are good.

JAD: Yeah, yeah. But the next time you're feeling stressed out and you say to yourself, "I'm stressed. I need to go to a movie to relax." Well, you should know that the technology that made the movies is exactly the thing which sped up the pace of modern life, which stressed you out, which led you to go to the movies.

ROBERT: I don't—what does that mean? What do you mean by that?

JAD: Well, one of the first ways movies were used was to film factory workers doing repetitive tasks, and then find out how to make those tasks more efficient.

ROBERT: So if I were pushing the levers maybe too slowly, is this how ...

JAD: Right. They would find the guy who did it the right way, film him, slow the film down, and then use that to teach everyone else.

ROBERT: And then when World War II came, this was not just now in the cause of efficiency, this was a life or death matter because this is how you beat Nazis.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: All the scientific devices of chronology are machines manufacturing time. The tools that are in our hands means victory, and our hands must be as relentless as the hands of our clocks.]

ROBERT: Or there's a whole 'nother way to think about this. Time can be a weapon in battle.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Or it can be the most sensuous and subtle and natural thing of the world. And I learned about this from a book by Jay Griffiths called A Sideways Look At Time.

ROBERT: Let me just take a stop here at the clocks, even though you don't like clocks, because there's so many cool clocks in your book.

JAY GRIFFITHS: [laughs] Cool clocks!

ROBERT: First of all, there's a spice clock.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes. We're used to clocks which you can see when it's really dark, and you can see that you've just woken up at 2:35 and you really didn't want to wake up at 2:35. But of course for a long time, you know, in the night you don't have a way of seeing what the time is, and so somebody invented a spice clock so you could taste your way through the night. So there would be maybe kind of, you know, cinnamon for about one o'clock and turmeric for two o'clock.

ROBERT: So you're sitting there in bed and you sniff the time?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Or you could taste it.

ROBERT: But how about the clock of birds? This is the Kaluli people.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Oh yes. Now this is lovely. The Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, they have what they call a clock of birds, and that certain birds like the New Guinea friarbird and the hooded butcherbird, when they sing in the mornings, the children are taught to understand that that's a signal to get up and leave and, you know, get out of the house.

[birds calls]

JAY GRIFFITHS: When those birds sing their late afternoon calls, that's a signal to the children to go back home.

[bird calls]

JAY GRIFFITHS: The forest in Central Hinds in Papua New Guinea, I've been there. It's a very, very difficult place to be in once it's dark, and the children would need to know at what time to start heading for home.

ROBERT: Now how about it's 1751, and Carl Linnaeus, famous categorizer of everything in Sweden ...

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, made a flower clock.

ROBERT: What'd he make?

JAY GRIFFITHS: A flower clock, so that you could see by the blooming of different flowers what time it was.

ROBERT: Some kind of something that blooms in the morning and then folds up like a morning glory would be there in the morning, and then in the evening an evening primrose would come out?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes.

ROBERT: And these are all plants that open for an hour or two and then close. So if you're walking by, and you see a blush of, let's say, pink, then you go, "Oh, must be the morning." Or if you see a blush of purple you go, "Oh, it must be lunchtime." Or whatever it is.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

ROBERT: That's, by the way, very good gardening to be able to do that.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, isn't it? Isn't it? And connected to that, there's also in the Andaman Forest in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, that people have a scent calendar, which I find the most beautiful idea because what it was is a way of kind of describing the months by the scents of certain fruits and flowers.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Time is everywhere in nature. One of the things I wanted to do with the whole book was to say, you know, we think of time having to do with clocks. In fact, for most of the world, for most of history, time has been absolutely embedded in nature in some beautiful ways.

JAD: We'll hear more from author Jay Griffiths later in the program. Thanks Robert.

ROBERT: No, thank you.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will be back in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Matt Boushca.]

[LISTENER: And Alyssa Oldcrow]

[LISTENER: In Gainesville, Florida. And 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.]

[LISTENER: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. Our program today is about time, all the different flavors of time. And here with me to show us a taste of flavors is Robert Krulwich, correspondent for ABC News and Nightline.

ROBERT: Yep, hi.

JAD: Robert, we've been talking about clocks for the last 20 minutes.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And if you took all the clocks ...

ROBERT: Ooh, you've been counting. 20 minutes exactly.

JAD: [laughs] If you took away all the clocks we've been talking about, the bird clock, and the spice clock, and the clock on the wall ...

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: ... and then you had to talk about time without mentioning a clock, what are we left with? How would you do it?

ROBERT: That's actually a pretty tough question. What is time, essentially?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I have a neighbor, Brian Greene. He's the best-selling author of The Elegant Universe, Fabric of the Cosmos, most recently. Professor of math at Columbia, professor of physics at Columbia—pretty much does Columbia. I asked him your question. I asked him what is time?

BRIAN GREENE: If you really pushed me and said, "What is time?" I'd say time is that which allows us to see that something has changed. When you see the second hand on your clock going around, it's changing position, and that's the simplest version of a change corresponding to time elapsing.

JAD: Okay, Robert. I'm looking at the clock here on the wall.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And I'm watching the second hand and it is changing positions, just as he said. Now imagine all the clocks in the world agree on what a second is, but what if we were to take the clocks away? Is there—I mean, I still in my bones believe that somewhere there is a clock ticking that says what a second is and it's always the same.

ROBERT: A second is the same in Mars and in—yeah.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: Everybody thinks that because it's so sensible that time is universally the same for everyone. Now here's the big secret: apparently, that's not true! Time is not universal. And this, says Brian, is part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

BRIAN GREENE: When we move relative to each other, a very basic lesson of relativity is that our watches will tick off time at different rates. If you have a good watch—I don't know what a good watch is to tell you. I don't own one, but if you had a Rolex ...

ROBERT: You don't own a watch, do you?

BRIAN GREENE: I never have owned a watch.

ROBERT: Is that right? You've never owned a watch?

BRIAN GREENE: I've never owned a watch. I've never liked the idea of a timepiece sort of ticking away on my arm. It really always bothered me.

ROBERT: [laughs]

BRIAN GREENE: But anyway, if you had a Rolex and I had a Rolex, say, and we synchronize them perfectly, then we move relative to one another, and then we rejoin and compare our watches, they will not agree.

ROBERT: Well, to demonstrate what Brian was talking about, we are now in Central Park. We've got the area entirely roped off because we are going to demonstrate one of Einstein's famous thought experiments.

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: Which suggests that the subject—if you will, I would be the subject, Jad.

JAD: By all means.

ROBERT: The subject must take a trip at an extraordinarily high speed. That's required here. So if you could help me by giving me whatever you've got over there.

JAD: Sure. Here is a jet pack, a turbo-charged jet pack. Put it on.

ROBERT: Back. Yeah.

JAD: Okay. Now take these rollerblades.

ROBERT: Oh, okay.

JAD: Put one on your right foot ...

ROBERT: I'll put one on my right foot and ...

JAD: On your left.

ROBERT: ... on the left. Right.

JAD: Set the target speed dial on your jetpack to 669 million miles an hour.

ROBERT: That's a little fast. 669 million miles an hour. Okay.

JAD: Yep. What time does your watch say?

ROBERT: 5:24.

JAD: So does mine. We are synchronized.

ROBERT: Exactly synchronized. Okay.

JAD: Now when it gets to 5:25 in three, two, one—push the red button.

ROBERT: Hitting the red button and—this is really fast. I am not on planet Earth, and I see a galaxy on this side. I see another one coming up over there. Whoo! Another galaxy going by there. Now by the way, my watch is absolutely quite perfectly. I'm having a lovely time. I'm coming around. I'm back in. Coming in now, coming in now. Coming closer, coming closer, and landed. That was very bracing!

JAD: Now Robert?

ROBERT: Yes. Mm-hmm?

JAD: Look at your watch.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: What time does it say?

ROBERT: It says 5:26. What time is it on your watch?

JAD: 5:33.

ROBERT: That's a seven-minute difference. Is your watch broken?

JAD: No, no, no.

ROBERT: Because my watch is working pretty well.

JAD: Time for you is different than time for me.

ROBERT: You mean literally?

JAD: Literally! It's not that my watch somehow was shooken up and wasn't functioning properly, no. Time itself is not some universal concept. Time is held by the individual, by the observer. So that if I am moving relative to you, time for me elapses at a different rate than it does for you.

ROBERT: So relativity says that time and speed are mysteriously coupled so that when I go fast, my time goes slow.

JAD: Which explains why our watches don't agree.

ROBERT: Exactly.

JAD: So this whole notion that we all have that time kind of applies the same to everybody on Earth and Mars, Jupiter, the entire cosmos that we can see is totally wrong. But let me ask you this: when you were rushing through space before and your time was apparently going slower, but did you feel slower?

ROBERT: If I'd looked at my watch, everything was perfectly normal to me. My clock was ticking perfectly normal for me.

JAD: Well, so was mine at Central Park, so what gives?

ROBERT: But if somehow you could have peered in on me up there in outer space going real, real fast, I would have seemed slower to you.

JAD: Ah!

ROBERT: Not only would my watch be ticking slower for you, everything about me would be behaving slower to you.

JAD: So what do you do with this information?

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: Well, physics teaches us that if I'm, say, running down the street and my time is ticking infinitesimally slower than that guy's time over there.

ROBERT: Why?

JAD: Because he's standing still.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And you're running.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So you're in different time capsules, kind of.

JAD: Apparently so. And I know this is what science tells me.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: But my common sense tells me that that is completely wrong.

ROBERT: I know.

JAD: Nothing in my experience tells me this is the case.

ROBERT: This is like one of the great conundrums, it seems to me, that what you learn in science is so different to what you feel in your regular life. How do you live between those two worlds where what you know and what you feel are so different?

ROBERT: Brian, do you learn to trust your mind over your senses? Is that what you do?

BRIAN GREENE: Well, I learn to trust my senses, but see them within a much larger framework. I love to walk down the street and imagine that because I'm walking, I'm kind of shattering the time around me. I'm causing time to elapse at a different rate than it would if I were standing still. I love that idea. It's not that I don't trust experience ...

ROBERT: So when you're hitting Times Square and you're wandering, you think, "Oh boy, I am really changing the universe of all these other people!"

BRIAN GREENE: Well, I really consider it totally personal so I'm not changing their time.

ROBERT: Oh, so what's going on?

BRIAN GREENE: I'm changing the rate at which time elapses for me. So I have power.

ROBERT: So when you run to catch a bus do you think, "Hey, I gotta get on this bus. Also, I'm slowing down time for myself."

BRIAN GREENE: [laughs] I do sometimes. Not always, but it's there. And, you know, when I look at the tabletop, I delight in the fact that I can, in my mind, picture the atoms and molecules and the interactions between them, and the mostly empty space that's in there. And that when my hand touches the tabletop, I see the electrons in the outer surface of my hand pushing against the electrons in the outer surface of the table. I'm not really touching the table. My hand never comes in contact with the table. What's happening is the electrons are getting really close together and they're repelling each other. And I love the fact that I'm in essence deforming the surface of the table by making my electrons come really close to it. That enriches my experience. It doesn't ...

ROBERT: Do you share this with others?

BRIAN GREENE: Rarely.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jab Abumrad. We're talking about time today, and here with me to help me do that is Robert Krulwich, ABC News and blah, blah, blah.

ROBERT: Blah, blah, blah?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Blah, blah, blah is my specialty.

JAD: We just heard from Brian Greene, physicist, tell us about a frankly troubling idea that there is no such thing as a standard time, which I'm still having trouble believing, frankly.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: In any case, it makes me think of this: do you know when you see a tortoise wandering through the garden ...

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: ... and it's going so slow.

ROBERT: Uh-huh?

JAD: And then you see a hummingbird whiz by—pew! Clearly, they're moving at different tempos, but perhaps they're also experiencing entirely different universes of time. Do you ever wonder about that?

ROBERT: I think everybody wonders that. But of course, unless you are a hummingbird or a tortoise, you could never really know whether what's going on in your head is different.

JAD: True.

ROBERT: But Oliver Sacks, the neurologist we met before, he found a different tempo, radically different tempos, in human beings.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: He's a neurologist, and he works at a hospital in the Bronx—still does—at Beth Abraham, where he once had patients who seemed so slow they were almost frozen. He told me about one of those patients named Myron V.

OLIVER SACKS: For long periods of the day, Myron would be apparently motionless, although when I looked at him, I would see his frozen figure in different positions in which his right hand would be raised. A lot of these patients would be frozen in odd positions, which I'm illustrating now.

ROBERT: [laughs] Little balletic poses, hand in the air. But just stuck, stuck in space?

OLIVER SACKS: Stuck. People would be stuck in odd poses. I thought Myron was one of those, and I commented on this, that I had often seen him stuck in these frozen poses. And he got indignant and said, "What do you mean frozen poses?" He said, "I was just wiping my nose." I said, "You're joking. You're putting me on." And he said, "I'm not." And he was as puzzled by what I said as what I was by what he had said. But then after he had told me this I thought well hell, you know, I must watch this and I must record it.

ROBERT: Now he said he was just what? He was just wiping his nose?

OLIVER SACKS: He said I was just wiping my nose.

ROBERT: Okay, now that's something that takes me about two seconds, roughly.

OLIVER SACKS: Exactly. Whereas apparently, this movement of the arm, if this is what he was doing, was taking about two hours. So I took a series of photographs at intervals of a few minutes each.

ROBERT: Of still Myron with his arms gently going up to ...

OLIVER SACKS: Of apparently still Myron.

ROBERT: How many photographs did you take?

OLIVER SACKS: I have about 20 photographs or so in two hours. And then I put them together in a little flick pack. You know, the way one used to do as a kid.

ROBERT: Right.

OLIVER SACKS: And then one could, in fact, see with this that the 20 or so photos covering two hours, in fact, showed a smooth movement to wipe his nose, a movement which normally takes two seconds, but which in him was taking two hours. Although this left open the profound puzzle of how come he was not only taking two hours to do so, but didn't realize he was taking two hours to do so? The movement, which to us was glacially slow was not slow to him, was normal.

ROBERT: Did you ever show Myron the pictures that you had made?

OLIVER SACKS: Yes.

ROBERT: And then did you say, "So Myron, look at this. It took you two hours to do this." I mean, if you did that, then what did he say?

OLIVER SACKS: He was astonished. That's too mild a word. He was thunderstruck.

JAD: Wow! So Myron had no idea that he was experiencing the world a bit slower ...

ROBERT: He had no idea.

JAD: ... than the rest of us.

ROBERT: Not until Oliver stapled all the pictures into a flip book and goes—flip-flip-flip-flip-flip—then sped up time. And then Myron can see what it was that he was doing. But, you know, does a turtle know that he's processing slowly? Does a hummingbird know that it's processing fast?

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: I don't think so. But in this case, we now know that this is a human being absorbing and performing at drastically different tempos from the rest of humanity. Oliver has another patient that he likes to talk about. Her name is Hester Y.

OLIVER SACKS: Hester, she would have the opposite of the slow or glaciation. She would move with extreme speed, and this came out very, very clearly sometimes when I had the students play ball with Hester.

ROBERT: What does that mean? They'd play catch?

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah, they would play catch. I'm sorry, is that the wrong word? Play ball?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, play catch is right. Yeah.

OLIVER SACKS: But one of the striking things when people are Parkinsonian is when people may appear unable to initiate any action. They can reciprocate, and if you suddenly slow a ball to someone with Parkinson's, even if they appear absolutely frozen, they will catch it. And often I would demonstrate this to the students. I would usually have seven or eight students, and we would usually sit in a semicircle around the patients. So Hester would be in her chair with a semicircle of students facing her. And she was so quick, and the ball came back and hit the student on his throwing hand.

ROBERT: Wow! So the guy throws the ball at Hester, she catches the ball and throws it back before he's even put his hand back in place?

OLIVER SACKS: Just so.

ROBERT: How many times faster is Hester moving than the student?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, let me put it in general terms. Her reaction time is a tenth of a second or less, and usually the best reaction times of Olympic athletes is about a seventh of a second. Anyhow, the ball came back very, very fast. And I would say to Hester, "Slow down. You're too quick for them. Why don't you count up to 10, pause before you throw the ball back. Count up to 10."

ROBERT: And she's still in her very speedy mode.

OLIVER SACKS: And she'll say "Okay! Okay!" And the ball would come back scarcely slower.

ROBERT: [laughs]

OLIVER SACKS: And I would say, "I asked you to count up to 10." And in a voice which I really can't imitate, but this is the crushed voice—the technical term is tachylalia, rapid speech. The crushed voice of extreme Parkinsonism, she would say "I did. I did count up to 10." I can't speak quick enough for that.

ROBERT: In her brain, was she thinking that she was giving normal speech?

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah. She was no more conscious of her speed than Myron was of his slowness.

JAD: Huh! So Myron has somehow slipped into whale time or turtle time because of the disease which sent Hester in the opposite direction into a kind of hummingbird tempo. Do you think there's a limit to this, how fast she can go or how slow he can go?

ROBERT: Well, I guess there must be some kind of physical limits. If she wanted to say 20,000 words in a second and could even get her brain to do so, her mouth wouldn't work that fast, her tongue wouldn't work that fast.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So there's constraints like gravity, energy, the nature of your body. We are ...

JAD: What about the rest of us? What kind of range is available to you or I?

OLIVER SACKS: I am not sure that such radical slowings or speedings occur in the rest of us except perhaps, in every unusual circumstances. Perhaps in sports and perhaps in situations of mortal danger. People who are in the zone, they may give descriptions of what appears to be a baseball comes towards one at 100 miles an hour. But some batters—are they called batters?

ROBERT: Yeah.

OLIVER SACKS: Okay.

ROBERT: Or people at bat.

OLIVER SACKS: Okay. But people at bat may say that the ball seemed to come to them more slowly, and that they could see the seams on the ball.

JAD: In the zone. Robert, I just so happen to have something here, which is a perfect illustration of what he's talking about.

ROBERT: Uh-huh?

JAD: Except it's not baseball. It has to do with track.

ROBERT: Track's good.

JAD: He's a short excerpt.

RUNNER #1: When I'm up they call my name. I step up on the runway. Usually it's just relax, you are the best, plant. I don't think anything else after that.

RUNNER #2: I want that adrenaline coming when he says "Runners take your mark," because I only got ten seconds or nine seconds at that point, you know? But if it's pumpin' pumpin' pumpin' pumpin', then they say "Take your mark," well, I'm exhausted. You know, once I get on them blocks and it's like, I don't wanna be exhausted. I wanna be on fire at that moment.

RUNNER #3: So I'm like, I'm ready, I'm ready. Temperature's 52 degrees. 52 degrees out here. My body's warmed up, sittin' in the blocks. I'm like, the cold ain't even—it ain't even fazing me. I don't even feel no cold because I got so much adrenaline going through my body. I'm just ready put it to 'em today, put it to everybody.

RUNNER #4: And if you're not ready, it doesn't matter at this point because you have to be ready.

RUNNER #5: And when he says set ...

RUNNER #2: Set. Sitting there thinking it's gonna go off. You breathing, give it all you got. Just take it out from the gun and hold on. You gonna feel a strength after you hear it. You'll slow down, no fatigue or nothin' gonna come over. Whoever's in the lane behind me, they gonna get it. I'm just listening. Get in tune, get in tune, listen to the whole hush of the crowd as they get quiet for the gun.

RUNNER #3: And that moment, when they say take your mark set, I become the gun. So when that gun fires, it's almost like I'm the bullet being fired out of the pistol. And that's my reaction. When I hear that sound it's almost like there's a firing pin smacking me in my butt and pushing me. So it's not that I sound out everything around me, I've already sounded out everything because I'm the bullet and it's only me in the chamber.

RUNNER #4: You line up, you hear the gun man say "Set." And at that point, you become blind and deaf because you don't go off of what you think you've heard, because if you do that you've just lost the race. You have to be one with the gun.

RUNNER #5: And when he says "Set," I just breathe all the air in. I take a deep inhale ...

RUNNER #2: Take one last look at my competitors in the lane. Now I'm focused, just thinking "Drive and go. Drive and go."

RUNNER #5: And then I hold my breath and then ...

RUNNER #3: Sweet, sweet, sweet. Drive, drive, drive. Pick 'em up, pick 'em up, pick 'em up.

RUNNER #5: I let all the air out, and that's when I start running as fast as I can.

RUNNER #4: When you're running, and you're so relaxed in what you're doing to where a song can just pop into your mind about 30 meters, that is the ultimate point I think an athlete wants to be because that's when you get that peak performance. It's almost like everything is moving in slow motion and you watching the birds kind of slowly fly by, and you hear that song just whistling in your ear.

RUNNER #1: When I take off, and I start to climb in the air, it all goes pretty fast. But once I hit that apex of the jump and my hips are up over the bar, time really slows down. I mean, you can just feel this rotation, and it feels like someone's grabbed a hold of your hips and really given you a push, a boost up in the air. And for this moment that you're sort of suspended on top of the bar, it's really serene. It's really almost peaceful. It just seems like it lasts an eternity.

RUNNER #2: Coming up the turn. I'm in the front, I'm in the front.

RUNNER #3: They coming for me. They just stalking me like a cheetah.

RUNNER #2: I'm in the front, I'm in the front.

RUNNER #3: So I'm just thinkin' just get away, just get away, just get away. Turn out the burn.

RUNNER #2: Hold on, hold on. Just stretch it out, start doing.

RUNNER #5: Get to the top, turn out the burn.

RUNNER #2: Hold on, hold on.

RUNNER #4: Powering down, powering down at the turn. See him come up beside me out of the periphery.

RUNNER #2: Gotta hold on. This is always happening. They just tryin' to get you at the end but you can fight 'em off. You can fight 'em off.

RUNNER #1: At the end, it's just compete, compete, compete—and then they at the tape.

RUNNER #3: Reach and go, reach and go, reach and go.

RUNNER #5: Cut them off. Cut them off, baby. Cut them off.

RUNNER #3: Get across the line, just smile at 'em, smile at 'em.

RUNNER #5: And we get down to the tape.

RUNNER #3: Got here in like a half of a step. That's the kind of stuff I live for. I live for those intense moments like that right there.

RUNNER #2: It's hard to accept the fact sometimes, that you are human. But it's true. And I've had a heart surgery in the year 2000, but as an athlete, and you can ask almost any athlete, they'll tell you, "We believe we're invincible." Because if we go in there with any other thought, there's no chance of us accomplishing our goal. Because we have to believe, we have to confuse ourselves into believing that no matter what's wrong with you, or what you're dealing with, it's not gonna be a factor to what you're trying to accomplish. We believe we're invincible.

JAD: Thanks to The Next Big Thing and sound artist Ben Reuben for that. A piece he produced for the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. You can visit them on the web at trackhall.com. So Robert, what do you think?

ROBERT: This is a case, I think, of athletes showing you how we contest with time, get power by mastering time, shaving it slightly.

JAD: Time and power have a long history. That's what we'll look at shortly. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich will be back in a moment.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Bill Schiller from Oak Harbor, Washington. 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: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. My guest today is Robert Krulwich, the science correspondent for ABC News, NOVA and Nightline. And we're talking about time—the freezing of, the speeding up of, the slowing down of, the bizarre science of, and now the politics of time.

ROBERT: Speaking of which, my interview with—remember Jay Griffiths whom we heard in the previous whatever section?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: She began her interview with me with a strange declaration which she read off a piece of paper.

JAY GRIFFITHS: "This is the independent free state of Trolheim. We have no allegiance to the government. We do not recognize history, patriarchy, matriarchy, politics, communists, fascists or lollypop men or ladies. We have a hierarchy based on dog worship. Our currency is to be based on the corg barter system. We do not recognize the Gregorian calendar. By doing so, this day shall be known as one. Be afraid, be afraid all ye that hear. Respect this state."

ROBERT: [laughs] What was that?

JAY GRIFFITHS: That was the manifesto of British anti-road protests in the mid '90s.

ROBERT: The British anti-road protesters?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes.

ROBERT: They were people who don't like roads?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes. Environmentalists who were protesting against the building of roads, and one of the things that they chose to do was to write this self-governing manifesto, pointing out that for them, they were not gonna recognize Greenwich Mean Time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: At the tone, three hours, 24 minutes coordinated universal time.]

JAY GRIFFITHS: Time is a highly political subject. It initially was the British sense of time which was transported all over the world. Britons ruled their empire through ruling the oceans. They ruled the oceans because they discovered chronometers of sufficient accuracy to discover longitude. What the British did in their empires was to insist on GMT, Greenwich Mean Time and, you know, that other countries were sort of Greenwich Mean Time retarded a bit or advanced a bit, but essentially ours was the norm.

ROBERT: The real time was in London.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Ours was the real time in London.

ROBERT: What's true, of course, is the British don't own the seas anymore, but we all still use Greenwich Mean Time.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Absolutely, absolutely. We're very used to thinking that empires are to do with land. What I'm arguing is that actually there have been empires of time.

ROBERT: There's one story you tell about the rulers. This is the ruler of Turkmenistan, the current ruler of Turkmenistan, a guy named President Nyýazow. Now the month of January in Turkmenistan is called Türkmenbaşy and the month of April is called Gurbansoltan.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes.

ROBERT: Why are they called that?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Well, he named one after himself and one after his mother. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] You mean, everybody there in January calls it, you know, President-Of-Our-Country month? Whatever ...

JAY GRIFFITHS: Well, I don't actually know whether, you know, that it's taken off in the street, as it were.

ROBERT: I see.

JAY GRIFFITHS: And I rather suspect it probably hasn't. But what he wanted to do was what, in fact, many rulers have wanted to do, is to ally themselves with the clock and the calendar. I mean, like Pol Pot decided that 1975 would be year zero.

ROBERT: Pol Pot said, "All right, everything starts with me." Is that what that means?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, exactly. Everything starts with me now when I say it does. This is year zero.

ROBERT: And to you, I guess, the joy of time, the deepest, most ecstatic version of it, is when you lose it completely.

JAY GRIFFITHS: I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's something that, you know in prayer, in meditation, in art—and in love, actually—is that people lose that very fretful ticking off kind of sense of clock time, and what you fall into is something transcendent. You know, all that you have to have done is loved somebody to know that, and to hold them for half an hour and you can know that that half an hour has lasted an eternity.

ROBERT: Time standing still in the moment like that is a really swollen now.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that in a sense, you know, that's when the moment meets the eternal. That is all that matters is just this moment that you're holding in your hand.

JAD: Thanks, Robert. That was great.

ROBERT: Thank you.

JAD: Jay Griffiths is the author of A Sideways Look At Time. You can find out more about her on our website, Radiolab.org. We'll close our program today on time the way we started: with an excerpt of a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You know the one.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: Except this is not the way Beethoven would have intended it to be performed. The piece he wrote to last 70 minutes has been stretched to 24 hours.

ROBERT: 24 hours.

JAD: Yep, bringing it even closer to eternity. Recently a group of San Franciscans spent an entire weekend in a gallery in a trance listening to all 24 hours. It began on a Friday evening.

WOMAN: It is 1:02 in the morning.

JAD: And went all night.

WOMAN: So it's about 3:45 in the morning.

WOMAN: It's 3:55 in the morning.

WOMAN: It's four o'clock in the morning!

JAD: Sound artist Aaron Ximm was there, otherwise known as the Quiet American. The performance was at his gallery, in fact. To close our show today, we asked him to give us a taste of what it sounded like.

AARON XIMM: It starts with this verse: dun dun dun, dun dun dun. And then da dun, da dun, da dun, da dun. But, you know, here it's like ...

MAN: Even though it's like a very simple thing to do to say okay, it's not gonna be 90 minutes it's gonna be a day, it still gives you that sense of floating time or hanging time. A time that takes a long time to pass, that you have in certain places in your life where a major thing happens. It evokes that somehow.

MAN: You know how people report that your life flashes before your eyes in a car crash or something like that? Time seems to slow down for people in, like, these really tense moments. What if you happen to be playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on your—like, on your car stereo while you were going into some car crash or something like that? Time seems to slow down for people. It's like these really tense moments. What if you happen to be playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on—like, on your car stereo while you were going into some car crash or something? Would it slow down and sound like this?

MAN: The idea was to stretch something to 24 hours. By stretching Beethoven's Ninth, I not only stretched a piece of music, I stretched music history.

WOMAN: Oh God, Beethoven for 24 hours.

MAN: I'm just wondering if Beethoven is slowly spinning in his grave.

MAN: Lyfinga. That's my name. I'm here in San Francisco this weekend. This is the second full 24-hour performance.

MAN: Upstairs where the performance is going on has a good vibe. Everything seems very gentle.

WOMAN: The floor is completely covered with bean bags or pillows.

WOMAN: The space has really amazing acoustics.

WOMAN: The sound system here is really good.

WOMAN: What can I say? It's designed to be contemptuous.

MAN: Why would I do this? I have no idea why I'm doing it. Will I do it again? I don't know.

WOMAN: I want to see how I feel being exposed to one unique piece of ...

WOMAN: My first response was a very calming response, and when I walked in it was overwhelming.

WOMAN: And then I came in. I wanted to stretch and, you know, open up and expand.

AARON XIMM: So I had this thought that different animals based on probably their size and their heart rate might have different senses of time. Like, you see a hummingbird zipping around in this manic way, and you think we humans must seem very slow to that hummingbird. Everything we do must almost be slow motion to something that can just deal with things that quickly. And to a whale or some huge animal with a heart rate that is like once every few minutes, we must seem really fast. This piece is kind of like that. Suddenly, I felt like I was moving at hummingbird speed.

MAN: It's growing. It's getting louder.

WOMAN: It's growing and growing and growing, and you're just wanting it to climax. And it's not going to. Or it is, rather. It is climaxing, but it's just taking place over such a long time that to us, in our little small human time, it doesn't feel like it's climaxing.

MAN: That's true, it doesn't really climax.

WOMAN: The climax never happens.

MAN: It's just stretching out.

WOMAN: Oh God, Beethoven for 24 hours.

WOMAN: It's like euphoria for me. I don't know, maybe somebody else ran out screaming.

MAN: I'm really buzzed.

WOMAN: Oh it's like an ecstatic apocalypse.

WOMAN: The other thing I felt when I came in and continued to feel was that I was being lifted up. It was just a constant lifting, lifting. There was no end, just a constant lifting, lifting.

WOMAN: [whispering] It just got quiet.

MAN: [whispering] Yeah.

WOMAN: It sounded like it was supposed to go quiet there.

WOMAN: Yeah, it'll be a stretched out quiet.

WOMAN: Yeah, it's probably just like a rest.

WOMAN: Yeah, but it'll be however many times longer. Here it comes again!

JAD: That was produced by sound artist Aaron Ximm with help from Bronwyn Ximm and Jeremiah Moore. You can find more of Aaron's work on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Jad, I was actually going to be the long A vowel, the ah dimension sequence, but I was unable to make it to San Francisco. [laughs] I guess we gotta get outta here.

JAD: Yeah, we should close the show. This week's show was produced by myself and Ellen Horne.

[LISTENER: With help from Robert Krulwich, Max Bot, Brenna Farrell, Miguel Gomez-Estern, Salley Herships. Special thanks to Andy Lanset and Jenna Dare. Very special thanks to all the track and field athletes featured in this show: Shawn Crawford, Amy Accuff, Brenda Caws, Derek Atkins, John Drummins and Mary White. I'm Jason Perez. All right, hope that works for ya.]

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.