Time Waster p?
First Edition
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The 1 3 We Miss
By Austin Weight
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Th irs eF d it tE io n
Part One: How Time Works
NASA’s, Gravity Probe B orbiting the Earth to measure space-time.
First the science bit behind time itself. We need to understand time, the way that time works in relation to space and how space, time, light and gravity all effect time. This is in order to see how time works and what we are really missing. Seduction Pulsar, by Karoly Mihalec
Space Time
Galexys, by Tim Day
When it was first suggested that the earth was a sphere in three dimensions as appose to a flat two dimensional plane of sorts the idea was largely scoffed at, until experimental evidence proved it to be true. The same can be said with space-time, albeit with a extra dimension involved - it was once thought that space and time where separate and that the universe was was merely an assortment of cosmic bodies arranged in three dimensions. Einstein however introduced the concept of a forth dimension time, that meant that space and time were inexorably liked. The general theory of relativity suggests that space-time expands and contracts depending on the momentum and mass of nearby matter. The theory was sound, but needed proof. The proof came recently with NASA’s gravity probe B, which demonstrated that space and time where indeed linked. Four gyroscopes were pointed in the direction of distant star and if gravity did not have an effect on space and time, they would remain locked in the same position. However, scientists clearly observed a frame dragging effect due to the gravity of the earth that meant the gyroscopes were pulled very slightly out of position. This seems that the fabric of space itself can be altered and if space and time are linked then time itself can be stretched and contracted by gravity.
Facts On The Universe
Light speed - Travels at 299,792,448 meters per second or 186,000 miles per second. The furthest star we can see is 13 billion light years away. Our sun is 8.3 minutes away traveling at light speed. Its 90,968,000 mies at its shortest and 94,074,000 at its furthest. It would take us 200 days to travel there in a space shuttle. The moon is 238,837 miles way. There are billions of galaxies in one universe. If you where to reduce the universe time line to 24 hours then human life would only last for 7 seconds. This is due to the fact that the stars play a major part in time keeping, along with light and gravity. The most accurate clock in the world is the universe. It would be measured by the pulsar rotating round earth. Imagine us in that vast sea of stars and as they all rotate, time is measured by the speed that other stars rotate around us such as the pulsar moving round our planet would enable us to measure time. As the universe expands, it pulls time with it as space and time are linked. Therefore if the universe started to contract time would move backwards, such as the big crunch. Earth is gradually slowing down. Every few years, an extra second is added to make up for lost time. Millions of years ago, a day on Earth will have been 20 hours long. It is believed that, in millions of years time, a day on Earth will be 27 hours long. Facts is that A day on Mars is about half an hour longer than a day on Earth. There is no time at the north/south pole as all time zones fall in to one place making it impossible to define the time! Every day is about 55 billionths of a second longer than the previous day.
NASA’s hubble space station, a shot of the universe.
ALL 786 kNOWN
PLANETS AS OF JUNE 2012 TO SCALE BASSED ON MASS
In the grey box is our solar system. The other planets orbit other stars in the universe .
768 Planets and Counting, By Ken Denmead
There are two main ways of measuring time: dynamic and atomic time. The former relies on the motion of celestial bodies (including the earth) to keep track of time, whether its the rotation time of a distant spinning star such as a pulsar, the motion of a star across our night sky or the rotation of the earth. However, a spinning star notwithstanding (which can be hard to observe), these methods are not always entirely accurate. The old definition of a second was based on the rotation of the earth. As it takes the sun one day to
rise in the east, set in the west and rise again, a day was almost arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minuets, the minuets into 60 seconds. However the earth doesn’t rotate uniformly. Infact its rotation decreases at a rate of about 30 seconds every 100,000 years due to factors such as tidal friction. Scientists have devised ways to account for the changing speed of the earths rotation, introducing “leap seconds” but for the most accurate time you have to go even smaller.
Interesting Facts
How different time lengths compare? 13.7 billion years, the age of the universe. 4.5 billion years the age of earth. 65 million years, time since extinction of the dinosaurs. 365.242 days earths orbit round the sun. 86,400 seconds in a day. 1 second average length of a heartbeat. 1 hundredth of a second (centisecond ) eyes blinking. One tenth of a second (decisecond) lightning strike. one trillionth of a second (picosecond ) shortest measurable length of time. The average human sleeps of about 26 days, 9490 days, 227760 hours, 1366500 minutes and 819936000 seconds. We can burn as many calories when we are awake depending on what we do as when we are asleep. Your body cools down when you sleep to preserve energy. Below (to the right) you can see a diagram of the universe indicating the size of the universe. The furthest ring is 15 light years away from our sun. Imagine it like a massive clock face as the planets orbit - it would be like the hands on your clock face. “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental and timeless reality. Try explaining that when you get to work late. The average U.S. city commuter loses 38 hours a year to traffic delays. Wonder why you have to set your clock ahead in March? Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread around the world. Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during
Daylight Saving Time - saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil. In the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long. Saturn’s Rings The density of Saturn is so low that if you were to put it in a giant glass of water it would float. The actual density of Saturn is 0.687 g/cm3 while the density of water is 0.998 g/cm3. At the equator Saturn has a radius of 60,268 ± 4 km – which means you would need an extremely large glass of water to test this out. Milkyway Fact: We are moving through space at the rate of 530km a second. Our Galaxy – the Milky Way is spinning at a rate of 225 kilometers per second. In addition, the galaxy is travelling through space at the rate of 305 kilometers per second. This means that we are traveling at a total speed of 530 kilometers (330 miles) per second. That means that in one minute you are about 19 thousand kilometers away from where you were. Farewell old friend! Fact: The moon is drifting away from Earth Every year the moon moves about 3.8cm further away from the Earth. This is caused by tidal effects. Consequently, the earth is slowing in rotation by about 0.002 seconds per day per century. Scientists do not know how the moon was created, but the generally accepted theory suggests that a large Mars sized object hit the earth causing the Moon to splinter off.
Space Facts
Ancient Light Fact: The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago – it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun! The temperature at the core of the sun is 13,600,000 kelvins. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles. Solar Diet Fact: The Sun loses up to a billion kilograms a second due to solar winds Solar winds are charged particles that are ejected from the upper surface of the sun due to the high temperature of the corona and the high kinetic energy particles gain through a process that is not well understood at this time. Also, did you know that 1 pinhead of the sun’s energy is enough to kill a person at a distance of 160 kilometers? Cold Welding Fact: If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently stuck together This may sound unbelievable, but it is true. Two pieces of metal without any coating on them will form in to one piece in the vacuum of space. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces. This might seem like it would be a big problem on the space station but as most tools used there have come from earth, they are already coated with material. In fact, the only evidence of this seen so far has been in experiments designed to provoke the reaction. This process is called cold welding. Three Dimensional Creatures Being three dimensional creatures (possessing length, width and height), human are unable to see the fourth dimension as our physical world is
constructed within these three physical dimensions. We might feel or intuit time’s presence, but we can never actually detect it with our three-dimensional senses because it extends beyond our universe. Humans only perceive the fourth dimension time as memories lodged at variable intervals, the result of which is our apparent perception of time moving forward in a straight line. However, time still exists as a dimension and objects can cross it in a similar way as they do the others, although three dimensional like humans can only move in one direction forward through time. If we could see an object’s fourth dimensional space-time (or world-line) it may resemble a spaghetti-like line stretching from the past to the future showing the spatial location of the object at every instant in time. We see the Moon as it was 1.2 seconds ago. Our Sun’s mass bends its surrounding space so that the Earth moves in a straight line but also circles within the Sun’s curvature in space. The Sun’s affect on time is to slow it down, so time runs slower for those objects close to the massive object. Time And The Speed Of Light A property of light is that it always travels at the same constant speed in a vacuum of 186,000 miles a second (700 million mph) and you can’t go any faster. The reason for this is that mass increases with speed all the way to infinity and so an infinite amount of energy would then be needed to travel beyond the speed of light. The equation states that speed = distance ÷ time; therefore, if the speed of light (c) is to remain fixed then the distance and time in the equation will need to change. What actually happens is that time and distance are ‘relative’ to one another, and as you travel close to the speed of light, distances become shortened while time is lengthened. This is explained in Einstein’s Theory Of Special Relativity. For a person travelling at 99% the speed of light, Time slows for them by a factor of 7 If they were to travel to a star 7 light years away, at 99% speed of light, it would take them 1 year, but to an observer
Grodmbridge Eridani Wolf 359
Sirius G51-15
Struve Ross 248 Barnard’s star
61 Cygni
Luyten’s star Prodyon
Sun
L372-58 Ross 128
Ceti Lalande Indi
Lacaille L789-6 Ross 154
on Earth it would have seemed like 7 years. However, if that person attained 99.999% the speed of light , only 1 year would pass onboard for every 223 years back on Earth. Finally, You don’t need to travel at light speed for time dilation to occur but you won’t notice the effects until you go extremely fast. Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, Strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a millisecond every 24 hours. Modern technology can do better. In 1972 a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time, so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second. To keep this time in sync with Earth’s slowing rotation, a “leap second” must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year’s Eve. The world’s most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second. On November 18, 1883, American railway companies forced the national adoption of standardized time zones. Thinking about how railway time required clocks in different places to be synchronized may have inspired Einstein to develop his theory of relativity, which unifies space and time. Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nanoseconds each flight. According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0. 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 001 second. Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.
Part Two: How Perception Of Time Works
1. Life-threatening situations People often report that time seems to slow down in life-threatening situations. Are we really processing more information in these seconds? Is it really like sports cameras capturing detail at high speed? To test this, Stetson et al. (2007) had people staring at a special chronometer while free-falling 50 metres into a net. What they found was that time resolution doesn’t increase: we’re not able to distinguish shorter periods of time when in danger. What happens is we remember the time as longer because we record more of the experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention but we don’t gain superhuman powers of perception.
2. Time doesn’t fly when you’re having fun. When this was tested by Kellaris (1992), they found that when listeners enjoyed the music more, time seemed to slow down. This may be because when we enjoy music we listen more carefully, getting lost in it. Greater attention leads to perception of a longer interval of time. The same thing happens when you have a really good, exciting day out. At the end of the day it can feel like you ate breakfast a lifetime ago. You enjoyed yourself enormously and yet time has stretched out. The fact that we intuitively believe time flies when we’re having fun may have more to do with how time seems to slow when we’re not having fun. Boredom draws our attention to the passage of time which gives us the feeling that it’s slowing down. There’s evidence for this in a recent experiment by Sackett et al. (2010). Participants doing a boring task were tricked into thinking it had lasted half
as long as it really had. They thought it was more enjoyable than those who had been doing exactly the same task but who hadn’t been tricked about how much time had passed. The subjects were more likely to believe they were having fun when time flew. So, the whole thing could partly be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 3. The Stopped Clock illusion The Stopped Clock illusion is a weird effect that you may have experienced. It happens when you look at an analogue watch and the second-hand seems to freeze for longer than a second before moving on. What is happening is that when your eyes move from one point to another (a saccade), your perception of time stretches slightly (Yarrow et al., 2001). Weirdly, it stretches backwards. So your brain tells you that you’ve been looking at the watch for slightly longer than you really have. Hence the illusion that the second-hand is frozen for more than a second. This happens every time our eyes move from one fixation point to the next, it’s just that we only notice
it when looking at a watch. One explanation is that our brains are filling in the gap while our eyes move from looking at one thing to the next. 4. Too tired to tell the time When things happen very close together in time, our brains fuse them together into a single snapshot of the present. For vision the shortest interval we can perceive is about 80 milliseconds. If two things happen closer together than that then we experience them as simultaneous. When we’re tired, our perception of time goes awry and we find it more difficult to distinguish between short spaces of time. This fact can be used to measure whether people are too tired to fly a plane, drive a truck or be a doctor. 5. Self-regulation stretches time The effort of trying to either suppress or enhance our emotional reactions seems to change our perception of time. Psychologists have found that when people are trying to regulate their emotions, time seems to drag on.
Vohs and Schmeichel (2003) had participants watch an 11 minute clip from the film ‘Terms of Endearment’. Some participants were asked to remain emotionally neutral while watching the clip and others were told to act naturally. Those who tried to suppress their emotions estimated the clip had lasted longer than it really had. 6. Altered states of consciousness People report all sorts of weird experiences with time when taking drugs like psilocybin, peyote or LSD. Time can seem to speed up, slow down, go backwards, or even stop. But you don’t need drugs to enter an altered state of consciousness, hypnosis will do the trick. People generally seem to underestimate the time that they’ve been under hypnosis. One study found this figure was around 40% (Bowers & Brenneman, 1979). 7. Does time speed up with age? People often say the years pass more quickly as they get older. While youthful summers seemed to stretch on into infinity, the summers of your later years zip by in the blink of an eye. A common explanation for this is that everything is new when we are young so we pay more attention; consequently it feels like time expands. With age, new experiences diminish and it tends to be more of the same, so time seems to pass more quickly. Whether or not this is true, there is some psychological evidence that time passes quicker for older people. One study has found that people in their 20s are pretty accurate at guessing an interval of 3 minutes, but people in their 60s systematically overestimate it, suggesting time is passing about 20% more quickly for them (Mangan & Bolinsky, 1997). 8. The emotional experience of time The emotions we feel in the moment directly affect our perception of time. Negative emotions in particular seem to bring time to people’s attention and so make it seem longer. Research on anxious cancer patients, those with
depression and boredom-prone individuals suggests time stretches out for them (reported in Wittmann, 2009). Just like life-threatening situations, negative emotions can concentrate our attention on the passage of time and so make it seem longer than it really is. This effect may be made worse by our efforts to regulate these negative emotions, which also has the effect of stretching time. 9. It’s Getting Hot in Here If you’ve ever had a fever then you’ll know that body temperature can have strange effects on time perception. Experiments have found that when body temperature is raised our perception of time speeds up (Wearden & Pento-Voak, 1995). Conversely when we are cooled down, our sense of time also slows down. 10. What’s your tempo? Setting aside emotions, age, drugs and all the rest, our experience of time is also affected by who we are. People seem to operate to different beats; we’ve all met people who work at a much slower or faster pace than we do. Psychologists have found that people who are impulsive and oriented towards the present tend to find that time moves faster for them than others (from O’Brien et al., 2011). There’s little research on this but it’s likely that each of us has our own personal tempo. Research has found that when different people listen to metronomes the number of beats per minute they describe as comfortable ranges from as slow as 40 bpm up to a high of 200 bpm (Kir-Stimon, 1977). This is a large range and may help to explain why some people seem to operate at such a different pace to ourselves. Time is relative The last words on time come from one legendary thinker; Albert Einstein: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”
Something To Try
You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.) Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times.
Part Three: The Wasted Space Of Night
This is photography taken at night exploring the spaces that are normally so busy during the day that are now empty at night. The freedom at night is endless as no-one is around. You can fully appreciate the peacefulness of night-time. The eerie dispostion of the night makes it beautiful and poetic. Studies indicate that sleep deprivation is linked with lower libido and less interest in sex in both men and women. Sometimes to spice things up you need to start by resting. 33% of those who drink 4 or more caffeinated beverages daily are designated at risk for sleep apnea - a disorder in which breathing is interrupted briefly and repeatedly. Chronic snoring can be an indicator. Lack of sleep can raise the sensation of hunger by 25 percent. Sleep more and you can eat more or burn more calories. One in five commercial pilots (20%) admit to having made a serious error while flying and one in six train operators (18%) and truck drivers (14%) say they have had a “near miss” due to sleepiness. Studies show that regularly sleeping too little (6 hours and less) OR regularly sleeping too much (more than 9 hours) is associated with shorter lifespan! 7-8 hours is the ideal. New parents lose out a total of 6 months’ sleep in the first two years of childcare. Men are more likely than women to drive while drowsy (56% vs. 45%) and are almost twice as likely as women to fall asleep while driving (22% vs. 12%).
Facts On Sleep
Can we learn while we sleep? New research has suggested that information is transferred between the hippocampus (the area for short term memory) and the cerebral cortex is performed while in deep sleep. Why do men feel sleepy after sex? Men feel sleepy after sex because of the exercise. Orgasms are reached when you let go of “all fear and anxiety” -this relaxes the body. Men release norepinephine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, nitric oxide (NO), and the hormone prolactin. Prolactin makes you tired (even stronger while intercourse than for masturbation prolactin is realeased four times more) Oxitocin and vasopressin are also associated with sleep and bonding (feeling of closeness with the sexual partner).
Sleeping on it really makes a difference. Sleep strengthens memory and extracts information from within the day. Sleep actually “extracts the meaning of your day”, on some experiments people do better a task after going to sleep: the brain categorizes the information of the day. Daytime naps improve memory! It also helps you remember important facts. Naps also cut risk of heart disease. Too much sleep - not good! People who sleep more than 9 hours a day are more likely to develop Parkinson. Sleeping over nine hours per night (for an adult) is just as bad as sleeping 6 or less. Sleepiness can be cured with blue light Waking up drowsy and sleeping may be caused by delayed sleep phase syndrome (your internal clock and the time people have set do not match) The solution: fast forward your internal clock! By wearing goggles and blocking the exposure of blue light when you wake up and waiting for your minimum core body temperature later in the morning for light exposure your internal clock is set. When you get enough blue light exposure you feel sleepy at the right time. Expose yourself to enough blue light during the day, Blue LEDs will do fine. Being Sleepy is just like being Drunk! If you lose two hours of sleep, you can impair your performance equal to a .05 blood-alcohol level Lazy Teens Teenagers should sleep 9 hours and young children require 10 hours of sleep. Sleep or be Sick Sleep deprivation produces higher levels of corticosterone (a stress hormone) and fewer brain cells are produced. Also the nerve cell production (neurogenesis) is severely disturbed and may be what produces the cognitive deficits with people with prolonged sleep deprivation. It seems that the body processes sugar while in deep sleep, if you don’t sleep well, sugar levels in your body will rise dramatically.
Night Facts
at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time - which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.) Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.) Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate
The space not in use over nights
As the Earth turns, the stars come back to the same place in the night sky every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds. This is called a sidereal day (star day). It takes 24 hours for the Sun to come back to the same place in the daytime sky. This is the solar day, and it is slightly longer than the star day because the Earth moves one degree further round the Sun each day. One day on Mercury lasts 59 Earth days, because Mercury takes almost two months to spin around. A day on Jupiter lasts less than 10 hours because Jupiter spins so fast. A day on Mars is 24.6 hours — much the same as ours. A day on the Moon lasts one Earth month. Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.” Everyone experiences time differently. This is true
time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose visionbased sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplate a variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.) Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.) Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the
origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.) Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats) mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.” A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Talk by Geoffrey West.)
The hours of our life time, How many hours do we spend sleeping compared to everything else.
Sleeping Other Activities Working Watching Television Household Activities Eating and Drinking Socializing and Comunicating Sports and Exercise Calls or emails.
Part Four: How Much Sleep Is Enough
How many hours sleep do we need? According to the National Institute of health, the average adult gets less than 7 hours per night. In todays fast pased socity, 6 or 7 hours of sleep may sound pertty good, in reality, its a recipe for chronic sleep depravation. while sleep requirements vary slightly from person to person, most healthy adults need bettween 7.5 and 9 hours sleep per night. Average sleep needs Newborns (0-2 months) Infants (3 months - A year) Toddlers (1 -3 Years) Preschoolers (3-5 years) School children (5-13 years) Teens (13-18 years) Adults (18+)
12-18 hours 14-15 hours 12-14 hours 11-13 hours 10-11 hours 8.5-10 hours 7.5-9 hours
NREM 1 NREM 2
NREM 3
NREM 4
NREM 3
NREM 2 REM
Dark Matter
Dark matter is space matter we cannot see because, unlike stars and galaxies, it does not give off light. There is much more dark matter in the Universe than bright. Some scientists think 90 percent of matter is dark. Astronomers know about dark matter because its gravity pulls on stars and galaxies, changing their orbits and the way they rotate (spin round). The visible stars in the Milky Way are only a thin central slice, embedded in a big bun-shaped ball of dark matter. Dark matter is of two kinds – the matter in galaxies (galactic), and the matter between them (intergalactic). Galactic dark matter may be much the same as ordinary matter. However, it burnt out (as black dwarf stars do) early in the life of the Universe. Intergalactic dark matter is made up of WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Some WIMPs are called cold dark matter because they are travelling slowly away from the Big Bang. Some WIMPs are called hot dark matter because they are travelling very fast away from the Big Bang. The future of the Universe may depend on how much dark matter there is. If there is too much, its gravity will eventually stop the Universe’s expansion – and make it shrink again. Leisure time on an average day for and average person. Relaxing (17 minuites)
Other activities (17 minutes)
Computer Games (25 minuites) Sport and Excersize (19 minuites)
Watching TV ( 2.7 hours)
Reading (18 minuites) Socializing and Communication (38 minuites)
Total lesure and sport time = 5 hours.
Time Use on an average weekday for a full-time University or collage student. Other ( 2.2 hours) Traveling ( 1.5 hours) Grooming ( 0 . 8 Eating and Drinking (1.1 hours)
Sleeping (8.4 hours)
Educational Activities (3.4 hours) work Activities (3.0 hours)
Leisure and Sport (3.6 hours)
Part Five: Animals vs Humans
Not all animals sleep. It does not depend on what size or species of animal it is to how much sleep they need therefore some sientist have questioned whether it depends on the animals brain or what they do, such as if they live challenging lives.
Other animals do dream and have nightmares like humans and obviously other animals do sleep - therefore there must be a reason for it- not just that we are lazy and incompetant, that is why it is a wonder why animals don’t. Scientists have questioned whether it is to do with recoperation, learning, resting, as an evolutionary response, conserve energy or as brain therapy.
Nocturnal Animal
Nocturnal animal species like sea turtles or seabirds visit breeding sites at night to reduce the risk of predation. This enables them to protect themselves, as well as their offspring, in the course of their lifespan. Otherwise diurnal, nocturnal animals are also most active during the twilight hours. Nocturnal animals have highly developed senses of hearing, sight and smell which are specially adapted to make the most of night-illumination. Some nocturnal animals have vision that is easily adapted to night and day illumination, while bush babies and bats are able to remain active only at night. Many nocturnal animals have special eye cells called rods that enable them to capture light when it is dark, more than humans or other animals can in the same environment. Since the air is still at night and scents linger in the air it becomes easier for nocturnal animals to pick up and track scents, and find food. Their sharp hearing ability enables them to locate their prey as the latter flee over fallen leaves and twigs. The bodies of nocturnal animals have special adaptations to enable them to survive the dark. Nocturnal animals like lemurs have special eyes, while bats use echolocation. Echolocation refers to the bat’s ability to emit a high-pitched sound which bounces off objects within range and gives the animal information about the shape, distance and direction of the object.
Animals Duration of sleep Duration of sleep (% of 24 hrs) (hours/day) Giant Amadio 75.4% 18.1h North American Opossum 75% 18h Python 75% 18h Owl Monkey 70.8% 17h Human (infant) 66.7% 16h Tiger 65.8% 15.8h Tree Shrew 65.8% 15.8h Squirrel 62% 14.9h Western Toad 60.8% 14.6h Ferret 60.4 14.5h Three Toed Sloth 60% 14.4h Golden Hamster 59.6% 14.3h Platypus 58.3% 14h Lion 56.3% 13.5h Gerbil 54.4% 13.1h Rat 52.4% 12.6h Cat 50.6% 12.1h Cheetah 50.6% 12.1h Mouse 50.3% 12.1h Rhesus Monkey 49.2% 11.8h Rabbit 47.5% 11.4h Jaguar 45% 10.8h Duck 45% 10.8h Dog 45% 10.8h Bottlenose Dolphin 43.3% 10.4h Baboon 42.9 10.3 Hedgehog 42.2 10.1 Squirel Monkey 41.9% 9.9h Chimpanzie 40.4% 9.7h Pig 39.2% 9.4h Human (adult) 33.3% 8h Guppy 29.1% 7h Grey Seal 25.8% 6.2h Goat 22.1% 5.3h Cow 16.4% 3.9h Asian Elephant 16.4% 3.9h Sheep 16% 3.8h African Elephant 13.8% 3.3h Donkey 13% 3.1h Horse 12% 2.9h Giraffe 5.8% 1h
Part Six: Intriguing Facts
-The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses. - It’s impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it. - Anything less than five minutes to fall asleep at night means you’re sleep deprived. The ideal is between 10 and 15 minutes, meaning you’re still tired enough to sleep deeply, but not so exhausted you feel sleepy by day. - A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year - One of the best predictors of insomnia later in life is the development of bad habits from having sleep disturbed by young children. - The continuous brain recordings that led to the discovery of REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep were not done until 1953, partly because the scientists involved were concerned about wasting paper. - REM sleep occurs in bursts totalling about 2 hours a night, usually beginning about 90 minutes after falling asleep. - Dreams, once thought to occur only during REM sleep, also occur (but to a lesser extent) in nonREM sleep phases. It’s possible there may not be a single moment of our sleep when we are actually dreamless. - REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thoughtlike, with little imagery - obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example. - Certain types of eye movements during REM sleep correspond to specific movements in dreams, suggesting at least part of the dreaming
process is analagous to watching a film - No-one knows for sure if other species dream but some do have sleep cycles similar to humans. - Elephants sleep standing up during non-REM sleep, but lie down for REM sleep. - Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting - to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains. - Dreams may not serve any purpose at all but be merely a meaningless byproduct of two evolutionary adaptations - sleep and consciousness. - REM sleep may help developing brains mature. Premature babies have 75 per cent REM sleep, 10 per cent more than full-term bubs. Similarly, a newborn kitten puppy rat or hampster experiences only REM sleep, while a newborn guinea pig (which is much more developed at birth) has almost no REM sleep at all. - Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain’s sleep-wake clock. - British Ministry of Defence researchers have been able to reset soldiers’ body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hrs. Tiny optical fibres embedded in special spectacles project a ring of bright white light (with a spectrum identical to a sunrise) around the edge of soldiers’ retinas, fooling them into thinking they have just woken up. The system was first used on US pilots during the bombing of Kosovo. - Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%. - The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, the Challenger space shuttle disaster and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been attributed to human errors in which sleep-deprivation played a role. - The NRMA estimates fatigue is involved in one in 6 fatal road accidents. - Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn’t wake. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours
of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle. - The “natural alarm clock” which enables some people to wake up more or less when they want to is caused by a burst of the stress hormone adrenocorticotropin. Researchers say this reflects an unconscious anticipation of the stress of waking up. - Some sleeping tablets, such as barbiturates suppress REM sleep, which can be harmful over a long period. - In insomnia following bereavement, sleeping pills can disrupt grieving. - Tiny luminous rays from a digital alarm clock can be enough to disrupt the sleep cycle even if you do not fully wake. The light turns off a “neural switch” in the brain, causing levels of a key sleep chemical to decline within minutes. - To drop off we must cool off; body temperature and the brain’s sleep-wake cycle are closely linked. That’s why hot summer nights can cause a restless sleep. The blood flow mechanism that transfers core body heat to the skin works best between 18 and 30 degrees. But later in life, the comfort zone shrinks to between 23 and 25 degrees - one reason why older people have more sleep disorders. - A night on the grog will help you get to sleep but it will be a light slumber and you won’t dream much. - After five nights of partial sleep deprivation, three drinks will have the same effect on your body as six would when you’ve slept enough. - Humans sleep on average around three hours less than other primates like chimps, rhesus monkeys, squirrel monkeys and baboons, all of whom sleep for 10 hours. - Ducks at risk of attack by predators are able to balance the need for sleep and survival, keeping one half of the brain awake while the other slips into sleep mode. - Ten per cent of snorers have sleep apnoea, a disorder which causes sufferers to stop breathing up to 300 times a night and significantly increases the risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke. - Snoring occurs only in non-REM sleep
- Teenagers need as much sleep as small children (about 10 hrs) while those over 65 need the least of all (about six hours). For the average adult aged 2555, eight hours is considered optimal - Some studies suggest women need up to an hour’s extra sleep a night compared to men, and not getting it may be one reason women are much more susceptible to depression than men. - Feeling tired can feel normal after a short time. Those deliberately deprived of sleep for research initially noticed greatly the effects on their alertness, mood and physical performance, but the awareness dropped off after the first few days. - Diaries from the pre-electric-light-globe Victorian era show adults slept nine to 10 hours a night with periods of rest changing with the seasons in line with sunrise and sunsets. - Most of what we know about sleep we’ve learned in the past 25 years. - As a group, 18 to 24 year-olds deprived of sleep suffer more from impaired performance than older adults. - Experts say one of the most alluring sleep distractions is the 24-hour accessibility of the internet. - The extra-hour of sleep received when clocks are put back at the start of daylight in Canada has been found to coincide with a fall in the number of road accidents.
Sweet Dreams
Blind People Dream People who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion. It is hard for a seeing person to imagine, but the body’s need for sleep is so strong that it is able to handle virtually all physical situations to make it happen. You Forget 90% of your Dreams Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone. The famous poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, woke one morning having had a fantastic dream (likely opium induced) – he put pen to paper and began to describe his “vision in a dream” in what has become one of English’s most famous poems: Kubla Khan. Part way through (54 lines in fact) he was interrupted by a “Person from Porlock“. Coleridge returned to his poem but could not remember the rest of his dream. The poem was never completed. ICuriously, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde whilst he was dreaming Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also the brainchild of a dream. Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder) but men and women have different dreams and different physical reactions. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women tend to dream equally about men and women. In addition, both men and women experience sexually related physical reactions to their dreams regardless of whether the dream is sexual in nature; males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow. Dreams Prevent Psychosis In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost
time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage. [Source] We Only Dream of What We Know Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts – did you know that your mind is not inventing those faces – they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember? The evil killer in your latest dream may be the guy who pumped petrol in to your Dad’s car when you were just a little kid. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces through our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams. Not Everyone Dreams in Colour A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white. Dreams are not about what they are about If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. Its like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. But you would never compare something to itself, for example: “That beautiful sunset was like a beautiful sunset”. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself. Quitters have more vivid dreams People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time then give up the habit have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience. Additionally, according to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “Among 293 smokers abstinent for
between 1 and 4 weeks, 33% reported having at least 1 dream about smoking. In most dreams, subjects caught themselves smoking and felt strong negative emotions, such as panic and guilt. Dreams about smoking were the result of tobacco withdrawal, as 97% of subjects did not have them while smoking, and their occurrence was significantly related to the duration of abstinence. They were rated as more vivid than the usual dreams and were as common as most major tobacco withdrawal symptoms.” External Stimuli Invade our Dreams This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream. My own experience of this includes repeatedly drinking a large glass of water in the dream which satisfies me, only to find the thirst returning shortly after – this thirst drink thirst loop often recurs until I wake up and have a real drink. Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralysed during your sleep – most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams. According to the Wikipedia article on dreaming, “Glands begin to secrete a hormone that helps induce sleep and neurons send signals to the spinal cord which cause the body to relax and later become essentially paralysed.” Bonus: Extra Facts 1. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming. 2. Toddlers do not dream about themselves until around the age of 3. From the same age, children typically have many more nightmares than adults do until age 7 or 8. 3. If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream in a more vivid way than you would if you woke from a full night sleep.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.