THE CLOCK MIRAGE: OUR MYTH OF MEASURED TIME - JOSEPH MAZUR
The first, and perhaps best, course I took when I was in college, 100 years ago, was called “Thinking About Time.” It was a philosophy course and it delivered what it promised, we did spend a whole semester thinking about time, specifically the McTaggart/Mellor theories and arguments. Heady stuff for sure, I was not really convinced by any of the “analytical” arguments of these guys but it did start me on thinking about time more critically. I think time has got to be one of the most considered and pondered over concepts, and one of the few concepts that truly can be described as universal. Not to say that different cultures and traditions don’t consider time in different ways, they do and I wish this book had gone more into that, but rather they all seek to describe how time works, which seems basically impossible. Mazur’s book is not as technical and dense as the stuff I had to read in that class. Judging by both his prose style and the picture on the back cover, he’s a groove old math professor at a liberal arts college, just a little desperate to show you how “far-out” math can be. And in that vein, he does his best not to scare anyone off by diving too deep into any single aspect of his arguments. In fact, this book is much more interested in giving the reader an overview of time than it is in arguing for a specific position. The book begins with explorations of how humans have told time, history of the clock, etc., and how technology has influenced people’s ideas. It dips into the wonky relativity time stuff but, thankfully, doesn’t go super deep. I’ve read other physics books (or, more accurately, I’ve read some pop-physics books and struggled through a handful of academic articles) that purport to explain how modern physics view time and they are deeply unintuitive. I sort of understand, on a logic/math level, why time would dilate as you increase speed but the underlying assumptions, that the speed of light is the true constant and a hard limit, don’t really make sense to me. Mazur does a good job dropping this before it gets overwhelming and making it very clear that the t of physics is divorced from our actual experiences. Maybe it will be relevant when close-to-light-speed travel is feasible but until then, it’s basically “how many angles can dance on the head of a pin?” to me. The book has another long, interesting segment about how time is felt and processed in our bodies. I got to learn a lot about SCN, a region of the brain associated with time, as well as how time is felt on the cellular level. This stuff was new to me, pretty interesting and a bit more accessible than the physics stuff. I guess my only complaint is that he doesn’t quite tie it all together, he lays out all these different avenues of inquiry and understanding but doesn’t come up with a theory that ties all of this stuff together. What’s the relation between the t of physics and the way time is felt on the cellular level? Is time a way to understand change? Is it just a feature of consciousness or is it a deeper characteristic of the universe? Do the past and future exist? Does the present? I do believe these questions to be unanswerable, though I would have enjoyed him going further out on a limb to answer them. But, irregardless, I love thinking about time and this book stimulated that part of my brain. One endless present moment.