A comparative analysis of time - with a poetic disposition
Chronos - How Time Shapes Our Universe
by Etienne Klein
translated b Glenn Burney
2005
Introduction
pIX
“Historians of science agree on one point: ‘modern’ physics truly begins with Galileo’s discovery of the law of gravity.”
“In 2004 ‘modern’ physics reached the four-century point.”
pX
“… certain scientific discoveries have enough impact to undo entire chapters of a dominant philosophical system.”
pXI
“Physics has benefited by taking the time to grow, consolidate its position, and then trigger revolutions at a breathtaking pace, especially during the twentieth century: Einstein’s special theory for relativity, quantum physics, general relativity, the discovery of nuclear forces and antimatter, the expanding universe, and others - “
pXIII
“Almost a full century after Einstein’s work, we will speak of time in the same way people did before Galileo!”
Ch 1 - does a clock speak for itself?
“Have you done tormenting me with your accursed time? It’s abominable! When! When!”
– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
p2-3
“… movement is a camouflage for time, an ersatz vision, through easy to identify; when a clock stops its immobilized hands do not keep time from flowing…. a motionless object is just as temporal as an object in motion.”
p3
“… every timepiece is also a chronometer; it allows us to measure duration.”
“In short, all clocks disguise time in a mix of movement and duration, duping us to confuse time with this mix.”
clepsydra
from this crystalinks
p4
“… on one wall in Tutankhamen’s tomb twenty-four baboons represent the cycle of the hours. The ancient Egyptians had indeed noticed that this animal had the peculiarity of urinating at regular intervals, nearly every hour. S they used its bladder for a pendulum.”
baboon bladders bide time from Wikipedia
p5
“At the beginning of the fourteenth century, clock towers… rang out the hours in towns all over Europe, synchronizing human and social activities and thus bringing a previously unknown regularity to the lives of craftsmen and merchants.”
“… language unrelentingly invokes [time] as a familiar object, while no one has seen it face-to-face and it has never signaled its presence.”
Ch 2 - the word ‘time’; or, every dictionary’s embarassment
“That which we can’t speak about, is that which we must say”
– Valere Novarina
p9
“… the word tme vaguely covers three distinct concepts - simultaneity, succession, and duration.”
“Blaise Pascal described the word time as being a ‘primitive’ word, in the sense that it belonged to that group of words that are so fundamental that it would be impossible (and pointless) to define them.”
p11
“”Moments pass, not time.”
Ch 3 - an unnaturally flowing river
“Each day is a Rubicon into which I yearn to dive.”
– Cioran
ch 4 - the time before chronos
p19
“In [the most ancient myths]… time’s primary function is not to make the world persist; rather it is identified with becoming…”
p20
“By castrating Uranus, Kronos took a major step in the birth of the universe: he split the earth from the sky, and created an open space between them. From that point on, anything the earth produced would have space to develop, and everything living beings gave birth to would be able to breathe, live, and procreate.”
[n.b. in some versions, Uranus' disembodied genitals fall into the sea, which foams up, bearing forth Venus on the half shell]
Ch 5 - the stopping of time; or, the abolition of the world
p24
“… for those who want to free themselves from old Chronos’s tyranny, love always seemed to be a promising if not efficient means.”
Chronos rigs the game
Goya’s Saturno Devorando a su Hijo
Ch 6 - not everything passes with time
Ch 7 - boredom; or, time explored
p34
“First, boredom detoxifies our relationship to time; nothing happens except the passing of time.”
Ch 8 - what makes time pass?
Ch 9 - eternal recurrence; or, the circle’s vices
p46
“There is nothing surprising, then, in the fact that the idea of time doing infinite loops could have prevailed in humanity’s major myths.”
p48-9
quoting Nietzsche
“… all things recur eternally, yourselves included… there is a big, long, immense year of evolution, which, once finished, turns immediately back like an hourglass, tirelessly, so that all these years are equal to themselves, in the smallest and biggest things.”
Ch 10 - causality: or, the impossible tick-tock
p53-4
“The line representing time is either open, or it closes on itself, in the first case it amounts to a straight line. In the second it is equivalent to a circle. there are thus only two types of time possible: linear and cyclical time.”
p59
“With linearity came historical production, invention, the new.”
Ch 11 - ‘time travels’ and other unchronias
Ch 12 - antimatter; or, the end of the trip
Ch 13 - 1905: ‘ow’ says good-bye to the universe
“Madame is late. That means she’s coming”
– Sacha Guitry
Ch 14 - does the future already exist in the future?
“The future is inevitable, but it cannot happen.
god pays attention to the intervals”
– Jorge Luis Borges
p84
“But where does the future take place? Saint Augustine gave a very convincing answer to this question: the future can exist for us only in our soul - … - which is the single entity to have the capacity (along with dreams?) to imagine what is not, especially what is not yet. To take shape, the idea of the future actually implies the idea of waiting, since duration divides us from it; it also implies the idea of waiting, since duration divides us from it; it also implies imagination, since we can anticipate only in fictitious way; it implies memory, the only thing able to reognize what will necessarily be repetitive in the future, like fall, winter, and summer, or happiness, sorrow, and happiness again. Memory ‘furnishes’ the future a priori. Without it we could only think of it as a big hole.
“It seems to be commonly accepted that the future exists only for the mind, not in and of itself; it exists because we wait for it, and not because it is linked to the present or the past by necessity, by the concatination of an anteriority that would determine it.”
quoting physicist Thibault Damour
“… it is probable that the notion of once passing means something only for certain complex systems, which evolve out of the thermodynamic balance, and which handle the accumulated information in their memory in a certain way.”
p86
“Would it then be - seriously - possible that we are the engines of time?”
Ch 15 - is time an opportunist?
p95
“In 1929 the British physicist Arthur Eddington attributed a strange symbol to time - the arrow…”
Ch 16 - the kaons gang turns time upside down
“This violates the right of being neutral.”
– Victor Hugo
Ch 17 - 2002: does cosmic time accelerate?
p107
“In the process of expanding, gravitation, which is always attractive, acts as a break: it tends to bring massive objects closer to one another. But what… new measurements seem to show is that another process is opposing gravity by acting as an accelerator. Everything happens as if a kind of ‘antigravity’ had taken control.”
p109
“… the universe’s expansion could be the engine of time: if it accelerates, if the engine of time is gearing up, the flow of time should also ‘accelerate’.”
p110
“The explosive trend of our societies thus seems to lead to confusion between time and what we produce in it.”
Ch 18 - some time…. only from time to time?
Ch 19 - dance of the superstrings and the several-step waltz
see The Elegant Universe
Ch 20 - theories seeking origin of time, desperately
p125
“.. origin, precisely, is not part of the ‘already there.’ It corresponds to the emergence of a thing in the absence of that thing.”
p126
“… the history of the universe that… unfolded over fifteen billion years:
(1) matter eliminates antimatter, its antagonistic double;
(2) then light splits from matter, making the universe transparent to its own light and matter free to restructure itself;
(3) then the galaxies are born, the stars and all the shapes that fill the night sky.”
p127
“Speaking about the beginnings of time creates a aporia: it comes down to situating time within time. Only myths seem able to transcend this contradiction.”
Ch 21 - chronoclastic spirit, useful watch
“Did I really let out the watch and wind the cat?”
– Groucho Marx
p131
quoting Einstein
“There is not a time of philosophers; there is a psychological time different from the time of physicists.”
Ch 22 - endless unfurling at the present instant
“if we live in lightning, it is the heart of eternity.”
– Rene Char
“Were it not for the point, the immobile point,
There would be no dance,
And all there is is the dance.”
– T. S. Eliot
Ch 23 - the unconscious; or, time without flow
Ch 24 - the physicist, the romantic, and the jealous type; or, the drama of impression
“Quickly, with his insect voice, Now says:
I am the Past and I sting you with my
Hideous thorn!”
– Charles Beaudelaire
Ch 25 - has physics forgotten death?
…then, a long-lost memory stirred in Sir Francis’ Bacon’s pneumoniac delirium.
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