[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: 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 KRULWICH: 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.

 

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