Nautilus Magazine
A new view of time
Introducing the Nautilus Time Project.
Beth Jacobs & Lee Smolin
Geology Makes You Time-Literate
A scientist tells us how her field instills timefulness.
Marcia Bjornerud
The End of Time
In the fundamental physics of the world, there is neither space nor time.
Carlo Rovelli
To Understand Your Past, Look to Your Future
An alternative to the Newtonian worldview promises to help explain quantum weirdness.
Ken Wharton & Huw Price
Let’s Rethink Space
Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them?
George Musser
Life is a Braid in Spacetime
How to see yourself in a world where only math is real.
Max Tegmark
Making Good Use of Bad Timing
We bend time to make our world make sense.
Matthew Hutson
The Mystery of Time’s Arrow
Past and future may not be what they seem.
Julian Barbour
Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present
Think there’s no time like the present? Modern physics begs to differ.
Mark Shumelda
Is It Time to Get Rid of Time?
The crisis inside the physics of time.
Marcia Bartusiak
M.C. Escher – Relativity
Past, Present, Futur: The science of Time
Lecture given on May 17, 2018 by Fay Dowker, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London, and dedicated to the memory of Professor Stephen Hawking. Institute of Philosophy, University of Geneva
Time is money
“Remember that time is money”, the famous quote by Benjamin Franklin, is here literally represented, the metaphor is transformed into its visual materialization. Iván Argote designed a web-based system to convert the time of day into money.
This digital clock shows the hour in euros or dollars, western/capitalistic currencies.
Telling Time
Exhibition Telling Time (L’éloge du Temps), MUDAC Lausanne, 2015
In 1999, G. Motti started “Big Crunch Clock” for the first time – a digital clock with twenty digits, from billions of years to tenths of a second – that counts down the five billion years between the sun and its explosion. The clock, which is none other than a detonator, is designed to operate, ironically, on solar energy, the artist forcing each purchaser to adapt the device to future technological inventions. After claiming responsibility for earthquakes, meteorite rains, moon and sun eclipses, G. Motti appropriated the largest natural disaster ever known, responsible for the disappearance of the solar system, and thus of the earth, thus freeing humanity from its millenarian terrors. With “Big Crunch Clock”, G. Motti pushes the boundaries of art, creating an unprecedented posthumous work of art, of which he is the repository.
En 1999, G. Motti met en marche pour la première fois « Big Crunch Clock » – horloge digitale comportant vingt chiffres, des milliards d’années aux dixièmes de secondes – qui fait le compte-à-rebours des cinq milliards d’années qui séparent le soleil de son explosion. L’horloge, qui n’est autre qu’un détonateur, est prévue pour fonctionner, ironie du sort, à l’énergie solaire, l’artiste obligeant chaque acquéreur à adapter l’appareil aux inventions technologiques futures. Après avoir revendiqué tremblements de terre, pluies de météorites, éclipses de lune et de soleil, G. Motti s’approprie la plus grosse catastrophe naturelle, jamais connue, responsable de la disparition du système solaire, et par là-même de la terre, délivrant du même coup l’humanité de ses terreurs millénaristes. Avec « Big Crunch Clock », G. Motti repousse les limites de l’art, créant d’ores et déjà une œuvre posthume sans précédent, dont il nous fait les dépositaires.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his work as a science popularizer and communicator (Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (Television series)). His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life (SETI Program), including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 and written as a frame narrative. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term “time machine”, coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle.
The Time Machine has been adapted into three feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It has also indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in many media productions.
La Jetée, Chris Marker
A man is a prisoner in the aftermath of World War III in post-apocalyptic Paris, where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods “to call past and future to the rescue of the present”. They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel. The scientists eventually settle upon the prisoner; his key to the past is a vague but obsessive memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman he had seen on the observation platform (“the jetty”) at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident there. He did not understand exactly what happened, but knew he had seen a man die.
After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory, and they develop a romantic relationship. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society.
Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time permanently; but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to find the woman again. He is returned to the past, placed on the jetty at the airport, and it occurs to him that the child version of himself is probably also there at the same time. He is more concerned with locating the woman, and quickly spots her. However, as he rushes to her, he notices an agent of his jailers who has followed him and realizes the agent is about to kill him. In his final moments, he comes to understand that the incident he witnessed as a child, which has haunted him ever since, was his own death.
Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!
Alice to Wonderland of the unconscious (French)
Lewis Carroll