Joseph Mazur - The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time

THE CLOCK MIRAGE

Also by Joseph Mazur

Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math (2006)

Zenos Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery behind the Science of Space and Time (2008)

Whats Luck Got to Do with It? The History, Mathematics, and Psychology of the Gamblers Illusion (2010)

Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers (2014)

Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence (2016)

Number: The Language of Science (edited, 2007)

Our Myth of Measured Time

Joseph Mazur

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.

Copyright 2020 by Joseph Mazur. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Epigraph (p. vi): From correspondence with Tasneem Zehra Husain about her forthcoming book Repaint the Sky, a collection of bedtime stories intended for her son, who would trustingly absorb them now and more deeply appreciate them at a later age. This quotation is an excerpt of the first story and is published with her permission.

Set in Galliard and Copperplate 33 types by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945867

ISBN 978-0-300-22932-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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TO MY FIVE EXTRAORDINARY GRANDCHILDREN,
SOPHIE, YELENA, LENA, NED, AND ATHENA.
EVERY DAY, THEY TEACH ME WHAT TIME IS.

Once, before Time, in a place beyond Space, nothing ever happened. You may think nothing happened because there was no time, and it takes time for things to happenand you may be right. Then again, perhaps there was no time because nothing changed and there was no way to mark any moment as different to the one before it, or after it, as Time is used to do. So it could just be that there was no time because there was no reason for time. Everyone likes to be wanted.
Tasneem Zehra Husain

Interlude: Undercover at an iPhone Assembly Plant in
China

Now, at an age when time is increasingly precious, I wonder why the minute hands of my life seem to move so fast that I sense gaps in place of stolen intervals of my own awareness. So here is a book about time, looking at its many folds, its history, its personal impact, the ways it is perceived, its connections to memory and destiny, its slowness, and its speed. A glimpse at what time really is.

You would expect a book on time to come from the physicist, the philosopher, the chronologist, or the clockmaker. Im neither a chronologist nor a clockmaker, neither philosopher nor experimental psychologist. I am, however, a mathematician and science journalist embedded with the troupes of real scientists and scholars who productively guide their careers through laboratory experiments examining the depths of knowledge, in particular on the question of time, whichat its rootis partly mathematical, partly conceptual, and significantly imaginary.

Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language, yet it is a word that eludes almost every attempt at giving it adequate meaning. If its a thing, it is a stubborn one. Dictionaries have never been able to peg it. They struggle to give it universal clarity. Their best descriptions give time as a point or period when something occurs, or the thing that is measured as seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, etc., or what clocks measure. My 2,662-page Merriam-Webster tries to pin the definition down with a 1,756-word entry. Tries!

It seems that time is a human invention that measures the lines of our existence. We are born with almost no real sense of it. We have clocks, calls to prayer, appointments to keep, places to be, deadlines to meet, expectations, times to eat, and times to sleep. However, since time is neither an event nor an entity that can be perceived, as Immanuel Kant and so many other philosophers have noted, the notion of time itself slips through every attempt to corral it.

Philosophers and natural scientists have been theorizing about time for more than two thousand years. Psychologists have been experimenting with the sense of time for not much more than a hundred years. But it is the public that actually uses and understands time with a reasonable working sense of what it is. Time is often personal, going with the job, the vacation, the triumphs and failures, the solitudes and friendships, self-reflections, illness and fitness, expectations and delays. For the farmer, it is the long spread between planting and harvest. For the racer, it is the split second before the finish. So I gathered the publics intelligent impressions of time from many of the best-informed sourcesclockmakers, long-haul truckers, astronauts living on the International Space Station, Olympic racers who won races by less than a hundredth of a second, intercontinental pilots who regularly cross multiple time zones, prisoners who spent months in solitary confinement, jockeys, factory workers in China fitting little screws into iPhones on an assembly line, and hedge fund traders who make suitcases of money by the second. My interviews concentrated on the experience of sensing times passing while leaving open any questions that had peripheral entanglements with boredom. The results were surprising and diverse in many ways. The public thinks of time differently than physicists and philosophers, who have been justly swayed by the dictates of mathematics. It is as if there are two parallel homonyms that are coincidentally spelled alike, one signifying a public notion, the other a scientific conception. Connected at their roots, they have common threads tied to a clear, unified concept centering on a sketchy idea that time is nothing more than an invented organizing tool enabling civilizations to function with order while empowering science to explore the universe with consistency.

The public impression is that time goes on in the background of life, as a kind of ticking clock independent of ones birth, an imaginary clock continuing forever, marking particular dates along in the memory of the Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it to make us feel time fly when we are filled with happy and interesting experiences, and linger when our experiences are dull. When lots of things happen within some timespan the memories give an extended telescoped impression of duration. On the other hand, think of those monotonous times weve all spent in waiting rooms of doctors offices with nothing worthwhile to read. Talk to any one of the more than two thousand prisoners who have been exonerated since 1989 for crimes they did not do. Talk to them about their memories of incarceration, about their illusions of times passing. Then talk to the prison guards and wardens about their sense of time. They get to go home at the ends of their workdays. They too spend their days in those prisons, yet they have different notions of time.