Innehållsförteckning för November 2018 från New Philosopher

“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.” Jean de La Bruyère Philosophers from Seneca to de La Bruyère have written on the brevity of our lives, exhorting us to use our time wisely – to guard it as we would a precious possession. Unlike possessions, however, time is irreplaceable. It’s not something we can work hard for, stumble across, inherit, borrow, or steal. It simply passes, or, as Steve Miller sang, it “keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future”. We hardly need reminding that our time is limited. Yet despite this knowledge, we often senselessly waste it or simply wish it away, distracting ourselves so completely that we lose all sense of the passing hours. It need not be…

‘Time’ is the most used noun in the English language; ‘year’ and ‘day’ are also in the top five. The smallest conceivable unit of time is known as Planck time, the time required for light to travel one Planck length (in a vacuum): which is approximately 5.39 × 10-44 s. ‘Dyschronometria’ is a neuropsychological disorder that means one can’t accurately gauge how much time has passed. It results from cerebellar dysfunction. Found in sandstone in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia, a zircon crystal has been dated by scientists at 4.4 billion years old. It is held to be the oldest fragment of the Earth’s crust. Time moves more slowly at sea level than in the mountains, and not just for clocks: all processes are slower, including ageing. The lower…

My wife is sitting on a plane as I type these words, flying from London to Hong Kong and then on to Australia. I’m staying at home, and from my desk I’m toying with a hypothetical question: if she gets up, strolls the length of the plane and then returns to her seat, has she come back to where she started? From her perspective, yes. From my perspective, however, both she and the plane are moving at five hundred miles per hour. Assuming her round trip took five minutes, this means she’s forty miles further away from London. So far, so trivial. But we can extend this investigation. I’ve been sitting at my desk for five minutes, typing and tinkering with these sentences. Am I in the same place as…

Deep in the Amazonian rainforest, in the Brazilian state of Rondonia, lives the Amondawa tribe, a people without a sense of time. Does that mean that they live in a perpetual present? That for this tribe, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will? Well, not quite. What the Amondawa lack is a linguistic term for the abstract concept of time. More specifically, researchers who spent time with the Amondawa claimed that the tribe lacked what some experts had thought to be a universal trait: the metaphoric mapping of time using the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. In other words, unlike just about every language ever studied, the Amondawa language doesn’t use terms like forwards and backwards to describe the movement of time – in fact, for the…

Physicists are not sure what time is or how it works. The dominant position is the one articulated recently by Carlo Rovelli, who reminds us that the equations of general relativity – one of the best-tested scientific theories of all time – are time-invariant, meaning that time is just one more dimension of spacetime, and it doesn’t ‘flow’ in the way most of us think it does. Rovelli offers the scientific take about several common misconceptions about time: (i) it doesn’t tick uniformly everywhere in the universe, as clocks travelling faster give slower measures of time, a relativistic effect due to gravity; (ii) the concept of ‘now’ is also a bit shaky, scientifically, as everything we look at actually happened some time ago, specifically the time it took light to…

Time /tʌɪm/ 1. The continued progress of existence as affecting people and things; 2. Time or an amount of time as reckoned by a conventional standard; 3. Point of time as measured in hours and minutes past midnight or noon; 4. A moment or definite portion of time allotted, used, or suitable for a purpose; 5. The favourable or appropriate time to do something; 6. An indefinite period; 7. (also times) A portion of time in history or characterised by particular events or circumstances; 8. (one’s time) One’s lifetime; 9. The appropriate or expected time for something, in particular childbirth or death; 10. The normal rate of pay for time spent working; 11. The length of time taken to run a race or complete an event or journey; 12. The…

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller’s words, we should have shown him far less scepticism. For we should have perceived his motives: a pork-butcher could understand Filby. But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. Things that would have made the fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to…

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. from Burnt Norton, by T.S. Eliot, 1936…

Questions from and answers for children, by Matthew Beard Why does time sometimes go faster or slower than normal? I call this the ‘holiday effect’. The last few days before you go on a holiday seem to take forever, but then the holiday itself goes in a flash. It can be a bit depressing, but it tells us a couple of really interesting things about time. Time is a bit like an itch. If you distract yourself when you’ve got an itch, you probably won’t feel it any more. You might notice it every now and again, but before you know it, the itch will be gone. But if you spend all your time waiting for the itch to disappear, it’ll feel like an eternity. Plus, you’ll probably scratch the…

A new azure vision passed before my eyes; but this time it was pure and saline. One might have said that the portents which that day were to rescue me from my discouragement and give me back faith in literature were determined to multiply themselves, for a servant, a long time in the service of the Prince de Guermantes, recognised me and, to save me going to the buffet, brought me some cakes and a glass of orangeade into the library. I wiped my mouth with the napkin he had given me and immediately, like the personage in the Thousand and One Nights who unknowingly accomplished the rite which caused the appearance before him of a docile genius, invisible to others, ready to transport him far away, a new azure…

Time to wake up: Daylight Saving Time is dangerous and unnecessary Our research has revealed that the shift to daylight saving time influences our ability to perceive the moral features of a given situation. We found that the day following the shift to daylight saving time, or following a night of sleep deprivation, people were less able to discern when a situation involved issues of moral relevance than when they were well rested. www.qz.com/1225586/daylight-saving-time-moving-the-clocks-forward-isdangerous-and-unnecessary/ Devil’s dictionary CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him. The best books on time “The main message of my book is that time is a multilayered notion. What we mean when we commonly say ‘time’ is…

Bright Thinking Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, Australia Monthly throughout 2019 Launched in 2017, this monthly philosophy discussion series is held on the second Thursday of each month beneath the vaulted gables of an 1840s warehouse at the Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart, Australia. The format is participatory rather than dictatorial and a topic is chosen ahead of time to allow attendees to prepare. Previous speakers include environmentalist Jenny Weber from The Bob Brown Foundation, Alderman Anna Reynolds, and Tasmanian Australian of the Year and speech pathologist Rosie Martin. Hosted by New Philosopher’s editor Zan Boag and Womankind magazine’s editor Antonia Case, in partnership with Island magazine, the Salamanca Arts Centre, and poet store. www.meetup.com/Bright-Thinking/ Adelaide Fringe Adelaide, Australia 15 February – 17 March 2019 Launched 58 years ago, Adelaide Fringe…

In 1964, Vladimir Nabokov began keeping a sleep diary. Every morning, immediately upon waking, he would write down whatever he could recall of the picture shows that his mind spun by night, and then, for the next couple of days, he would be on active lookout for any real-life experiences that seemed to echo the remembered dream. Nabokov was testing a theory which suggested that dreams might be prophetic; that rather than rehashing memories or reshaping personal trauma, our dreams might offer a proleptic vision of what is to come. What if we were all clairvoyant? Nabokov was swept up in the maverick thinking of John W. Dunne, an eccentric British aeronautical engineer, who, in the early decades of the last century, came up with a leftfield theory of time.…

Political power A Machiavellian person – the kind of person who devises and carries out Machiavellian plans – is clever and scheming in deeply unethical ways. newphilosopher.com/articles/political-power/ How power corrupts I think this sort of shifting of your personal preference into what’s right and wrong is one way in which power corrupts. newphilosopher.com/articles/how-power-corrupts/ New Philosopher online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher magazine, subscriptions as well as gift ideas. newphilosopher.com/products-page/magazines/ Power to the people? The notion of the will of the people makes sense when the people agree, but what happens when there is disagreement? newphilosopher.com/articles/power-to-the-people/ New Philosopher Writing Prize Entries are open for the New Philosopher Prize for Philosophical Writing. Enter now to win $1,000 and have your work featured in the mag. Open…

If Jonestown has a lasting legacy, it is in an expression we throw around casually today: to drink the Kool-Aid. “They killed the babies first.” So wrote Tim Cahill in his seminal Rolling Stone essay, In the Valley of the Shadow of Death, which described the aftermath of the Jonestown massacre. Leader Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple on ideals of social justice and racial equality. But in 1978, Jones called a meeting at the remote settlement in Guyana, where the cult was based. There, vats of a grape-flavoured drink (similar to Kool-Aid) were laced with potassium cyanide. More than 900 people died in a mass murder-suicide. Dogs and the resident chimpanzee were shot in the head. The killings saw a perverse hierarchy. Mothers gave the concoction to their kids,…

No one can really know how much time they have left to live, though some have a better idea than others – the terminally ill, those about to attempt suicide, or those who are under heavy fire, for example. The rest of us, if we don’t just ignore the ticking clock, may from time to time do a little best-case scenario calculation. I do. I am 56 now, so I have at best another 30 years of life of a reasonable quality, probably fewer given my father died from heart problems at 70 and my mother had dementia in her early 80s. Some projects, like writing books, take a long time – more than a year if there aren’t any distractions, probably much longer, so I know I won’t be…

The Logician Aristotle 384-322 BCE Different nows Without any change (or any noticeable change) in our minds, time does not seem to pass, as in the story about those who sleep in the sanctuary of the heroes in Sardinia, who wake up and do not think time has passed; what they do is amalgamate the later now into a unit with the earlier now and eliminate all the time in between because they have not noticed its passage. There would be no time if there were only a single now, rather than different nows, and by the same token, if the difference between the nows is not noticed, the time between them seems not to exist. So, if thinking that time does not exist is something that happens when…

As you read this sentence, there is a child, eight years old, toiling in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His father works alongside him, equipped only with hand tools; his mother is dead. The child is responsible for collecting and transporting large amounts of the extracted, cobalt-laden rocks around the mine and to the local trader. He is paid by the sack and, lacking any knowledge of the value of the mineral that he is trading, he has to accept whatever the trader pays him, which often amounts to 11 cents per day. The trader then takes these minerals to a buyer who does not care nor ask where the cobalt comes from. As the mineral moves up the supply chain to smelters and refiners…

What is your demon? The seemingly inescapable distractibility of the modern age. What is the most important part of your education? The times when what I thought I knew was flipped on its head. Which ‘thinker’ has had the greatest influence on your life? Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Islamic scholar and professor of law at UCLA. What do you doubt most? That it all will turn out well in the end. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? No more sweet and savoury dishes (apricots with chicken, raisins in rice, pineapple on pizza). They all must be stopped. What is happiness? Too often championed over contentment. What illusion do you suffer from? That I can ever get it all done. If you could…

Carlo Rovelli Carlo Rovelli is Professor of Physics at Aix-Marseille University and the author of eight books, including The Order of Time, Seven Brief Lessons On Physics, What is Time? What is Space?, and Reality Is Not What It Seems. He is Chief Editor of Foundations of Physics and is on the Advisory Panel of Nature. Rovelli has received numerous awards, including the Merk-Serono Prize, Rosignano Science Prize, Galileo Prize, Larderello Prize, Alassio Prize, and the Triennial International Prize in Relativity. Marina Benjamin Marina Benjamin is the former arts editor of the New Statesman and deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard. A memoirist best known for The Middlepause, which offered a poetic and philosophical take on midlife, her new memoir Insomnia is forthcoming. Benjamin is a Senior Editor at…

One Friday in April 2016, as the American presidential race intensified, more than three million people watched two reporters wrap rubber bands around a watermelon. At the height of the 45-minute live broadcast on social media, 800,000 people were watching simultaneously as the pressure – both the psychological kind, and the physical pressure on the watermelon – ramped up. (Others watched the recorded version later.) After some 686 rubber bands, something unsurprising happened: the watermelon exploded, messily. The reporters highfived, and ate some watermelon. The broadcast ended. The world continued its orbit around the Sun. The watermelon broadcast wasn’t culturally momentous in itself; indeed, looking at the internet today – with its Russian election interference, abusive trolling, fake news, and neo-Nazis – it feels like a throwback to a more…

“All that lies beneath the earth, time will bring into the light of day; what now shines bright, it will bury deep in obscurity.” Horace “The passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours.” Marcus Aurelius “There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.” Cicero “The bird does not know how old it is – the rose tree does not count its birthdays!” Marie Corelli “Time, a maniac scattering dust.” Lord Tennyson “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length.” Virginia Woolf “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future.” Steve Miller “I see the…

Zan Boag: You’ve delved into the mystery of time over the course of your life, a journey that has ultimately led to you writing your latest book The Order of Time. Why? What made you delve into this topic? Carlo Rovelli: I guess there are two distinct answers. One is that I was fascinated by theoretical physics, I got fascinated in particular by the physics of the 20th century - by quantum mechanics, by general relativity - then I discovered that there is this open problem at the core of theoretical physics, which is quantum gravity, and I decided to study quantum gravity. The nature of time is at the centre of the problem of quantum gravity: addressing this problem requires rethinking what is space and what is…

WHEN 1888 WHAT A Dream of John Ball WHO William Morris HOW Dream WHERE Back WHEN 1843 WHAT A Christmas Carol WHO Charles Dickens HOW Ghosts WHERE Back + Forward WHEN 1887 WHAT El Anacronópete WHO Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau HOW Machine WHERE Back WHEN 1889 WHAT A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court WHO Mark Twain HOW Crowbar WHERE Back WHEN 1895 WHAT The Time Machine WHO H. G. Wells HOW Machine WHERE Forward WHEN 1929 WHAT Armageddon 2419 A.D. WHO Philip Francis Nowlan HOW Cave gas WHERE Forward WHEN 1944 WHAT Future Times Three WHO René Barjavel HOW Substance WHERE Back + Forward WHEN 1952 WHAT A Sound of Thunder WHO Ray Bradbury HOW Machine WHERE Back WHEN 1955 WHAT The End of Eternity WHO Isaac Asimov HOW…

Nigel Warburton: Time is not an easy thing to think about. All of us experience time in terms of a present, a past, and a future, but beyond that it is quite difficult, for ordinary people anyway, to understand what on earth it is. Huw Price: Well, yes. As with many philosophy questions, part of the problem is that you don’t really know what you’re asking in the first place. And so, in the case of time in particular, we don’t know if we’re asking about our experience of time, or whether we’re asking about something whose existence we can be sure of independently of the experience. In that respect, it’s a little bit like the examples that those who called themselves natural philosophers were concerned about back in the…

Why Time Flies Alan Burdick Sensing time One of the oldest debates in the scientific literature is whether ‘time’ is something that can be ‘perceived’ at all. Most psychologists and neuroscientists have come around to thinking that it isn’t. Our five senses – taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing – all involve discrete organs that detect discrete phenomena: sound is what we call it when vibrating air molecules trigger movements of the tympanum in the inner ear; sight is what results when photons of light strike specialized nerve cells at the back of the eye. In contrast, the human body has no single organ devoted to sensing time. The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli Reality is not what it seems Reality is often very different from what it seems. The…