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time Deren is recognizable as the woman with the enigmatic expression at the window, silently observing from within. Although her eyes indicate distrust, she is not desperate to escape her domestic space, but she is not entirely comfortable immured behind the glass. This image symbolizes some of Deren’s most significant initiatives in experimental cinema. In this still shot she establishes a silent connection with the eyes, suggesting the possibility for reverie or even hallucination. It foreshadows her experiments with superimposition and the juxtaposition of disparate spaces. It is an image that suggests the most compelling themes of her film work: dreaming, reflection, rhythm, vision, ritual and identity. Like Cindy Sherman’s film stills, this image represents a poignant and hesitant moment, but unlike the photographs, Deren’s still shot belongs within a dynamic, kinetic narrative. Whilst she is first recognized by this image, what is little known is that Deren was also a dancer, choreographer, poet, writer and photographer. In the cinema she was a director,
writer, cinematographer, editor, performer, entrepreneur and pioneer in experimental filmmaking in the United States. Like Jean-Luc Godard and Sergei Eisenstein, Maya Deren was both a film theorist and a filmmaker. Unlike these luminaries, Deren’s writing remains relatively obscure in film theory and her films are rarely screened outside of experimental or feminist film courses. When she was born in Kiev in 1917 her mother named her Eleanora after the Italian actress Eleanora Duse. Deren’s mother Marie confessed that she crossed her legs and refused to give birth whilst her husband Solomon continued to refer to their baby as ‘him’. Marie recollects, “As soon as Dr Deren left, I started to deliver the baby”. In 1922 the Derenkowsky family fled the threat of anti-semitism in the Ukraine, arriving in New York where they contracted and Anglicized their name to Deren. As an adolescent Maya was sent to Geneva to attend The League of Nations International School whilst Marie Deren studied languages in Paris and Solomon Deren practiced psychology in New York.
…she crossed her legs and refused to give birth whilst her husband Solomon continued to refer to their baby as ‘him’.
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As a young woman Eleanora Deren studied journalism and political science and became active in student politics at Syracuse University. Deren transferred to New York University where she was awarded her undergraduate degree in 1936. At Smith College she completed a Masters Degree in English Literature and symbolist poetry in 1939. After college Deren began working as an assistant to the famous dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham. Deren found inspiration and nomadic adventure with the innovative Katherine Dunham Dance Company, touring and performing across the US. It was in Los Angeles in 1941 that Deren met Alexander Hammid, a Czechoslovakian filmmaker working in Hollywood. In collaboration with Hammid, Deren produced her first and most remarkable experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). 1943 was a year of transformation and consolidation for Deren. She returned to New York, married Hammid, transferred her primary focus from dance to film and changed her name to Maya. Her new name was particularly apt for a burgeoning filmmaker. Buddhists understand Maya to mean ‘illusion’, in Sanskrit it translates as ‘mother’ and in Greek mythology Maya is the messenger of the Gods. Meshes of the Afternoon was produced in an environment of wartime volatility and this is reflected symbolically throughout its mise-enscène. The title card suggesting that the film was ‘made in Hollywood’ is ironic, Deren sets her film within an LA setting, but it is the nightmare element of the dream factory that interests her most. The film establishes an atmosphere saturated in paranoia and distrust with lovers turning into killers and with the presence of a mysterious but fascinating hooded figure. As European émigrés, Deren and Hammid invest their film with an acute sense of restlessness and alienation. Meshes of the Afternoon reflects this uncanny estrangement
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in the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of its central character (played by Deren) and in its cyclic narrative, a structure that seems condemned to repetition. The hooded figure with the reflective face adds yet another dimension, reflecting back the identity of those who look into her eyes. Thomas Schatz points to Meshes as the best known experimental film of the decade. He categorizes it as the first example of “the poetic psychodrama”, films bearing the impression of art cinema which were seen as “scandalous and radically artistic.” He writes that the poetic psychodrama “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” Meshes of the Afternoon is shot as a silent film, there is no dialogue, communication between characters or diegetic sound. A record player plays silently. Whilst the disc revolves and the needle is engaged in the groove, there is no
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indication of the sound that it makes. Teiji Ito’s soundtrack makes Meshes appear like a music video before its time, the drumbeat is synchronized to movement and to the cut. When Deren takes one of her many short journeys along the path or up stairs, the sound of her steps is overlaid by Ito’s drumbeat metonymically standing in for and amplifying her movement. Inspired by Eisenstein’s notion of rhythmic montage, the editing and movement are accentuated by the rhythm of the soundtrack. Rhythm is a defining element of all of Deren’s films, it arises from the play of repetition and variation which is integral to her experiments in narrative. Meshes deploys an innovative style of cutting on action where the protagonist steps over such disparate terrains
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as the beach, soil, grass and concrete. The rhythmic drumbeat and the repeated movement highlight her deliberate progress across these discontinuous spaces. As the central, consistent element, Ito’s soundtrack enables Deren’s temporal and spatial experimentation. Rhythm also impacts significantly on spectatorship. The rhythm of the sound, movement and editing conspire to produce the effect of a trance film. Meshes of the Afternoon‘s dream-like mise-en-scène, illogical narrative trajectory, fluid movement and ambient soundtrack invite a type of contemplative, perhaps even transcendental, involvement for the spectator. Whilst Meshes engages the viewer, it also presents vision in crisis. The film is constructed from a myriad of eyeline matches and mis-
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matches. The use of extreme angles to imply one character looking down on the dreamer, a type of spider’s point of view, foreshadows the dreamer’s death. Seen in reverse it could translate as the dreamer’s ‘out of body’ experience. Occasionally Deren’s point of view proves to be ineffectual, the reverse shot from the sleeping Deren is impossible. The fourth replica of Deren’s character wears bulbous goggles that can do nothing to enhance her vision. The film sets up a nightmare vision. Meshes is a projection of the dreamer’s desires and fears. Deren’s point of view transforms into tunnel vision with her perspective funneled through a cylinder rounding out the edges of the frame. This nightmarish vision is intensified with the use of an obscure horizontal wipe, with a semi-opaque filter, mystifying the image and implying the beginning of the nightmare. In Deren’s nightmare progress is difficult, speed is varied and the emphasis on circularity results in an unnerving repetition. The hooded figure is perpetually out of range, all attempts to capture her prove futile. In domestic space, activity has been suspended. The phone is off the hook, the record player is playing, the knife has begun to slice through the bread. Deren writes, “everything that happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence – the knife, the key, the repetition of the stairs, the figure disappearing around a curve in the road.”
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Deren is clearly influenced by Méliès’ magical editing style with objects transforming without warning. Meshes is also inclined towards the Gothic’s fascination with the instability of objects, uncanny visions and confusion surrounding the intentions of the male characters. P. Adams Sitney refutes the notion that Deren was the director of Meshes of the Afternoon . He argues that Hammid “photographed the whole film. Maya Deren simply pushed the button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared.” Stan Brakhage also classifies Meshes as Hammid’s film. Deren’s biographers perceive the film as a collaboration, noting that Hammid provided the mechanical expertise to realize images born from Deren’s imagination. What is undeniable is that Meshes establishes key themes and cinematic innovations that Deren continued to explore throughout her career as an experimental filmmaker. Deren’s second experimental film, At Land (1944), reinforces her interest in the juxtaposition of anachronistic spaces and introduces a critique of social rituals. This film begins by
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reversing the natural rhythm with images of waves breaking and descending back into the sea. Starring again, Deren is seen climbing up a dead tree trunk on the beach, magically emerging onto a table where a formal dinner party is in progress. This ‘civilized’ world ignores Deren as she crawls along their dinner table. By depicting herself as invisible to the diners, Deren highlights the myopia of the guests. The dinner sequence in At Land ends with an enchanted chess game. A pawn falls from the table and descends back into the dead wood on the beach, it falls over rocks, into the water and is washed away over the waterfalls. Chasing the pawn, Deren is restored to her original landscape. Like Jean-Luc Godard and Sergei Eisenstein, Maya Deren was both a film theorist and a filmmaker. Unlike these luminaries, Deren’s writing remains relatively obscure in film theory and her films are rarely screened outside of experimental or feminist film courses. Her pioneering, uncompromising spirit enabled her to elude the institutional limitations that controlled filmmaking in 1940s American culture.
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BU FU LL BUCKYBALL_
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space One of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. “If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top… that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging C R AW L I N G _
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to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” Fuller may have spent his life inventing things, but he claimed that he was not particularly interested in inventions. He called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist”—a “comprehensivist,” for short—and believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources. “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe” is how he once put it. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.” Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr.—Bucky, to his friends—was born on July 12, 1895, into one of New England’s most venerable and, at the same time, most freethinking families. Growing up in Milton, Massachusetts, Bucky was a boisterous but hopelessly nearsighted child; until he was fitted
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with glasses, he refused to believe that the world was not blurry. Like all Fuller men, he was sent off to Harvard. Halfway through his freshman year, he withdrew his tuition money from the bank to entertain some chorus girls in Manhattan. He was expelled. The following fall, he was reinstated, only to be thrown out again. Fuller never did graduate from Harvard, or any other school. He took a job with a meatpacking firm, then joined the Navy, where he invented a winchlike device for rescuing pilots of the service’s primitive airplanes. (The pilots often ended up head down, under water.) During the First World War, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent architect, and when the war was over he started a business with his father-in-law, manufacturing bricks out of wood shavings. Despite the general prosperity of the period, the company struggled and, in
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“But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” 1927, nearly bankrupt, it was bought out. At just about the same time, Anne gave birth to a daughter. With no job and a new baby to support, Fuller became depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, thinking about, in his words, “Buckminster Fuller—life or death,” when he found himself suspended several feet above the ground, surrounded by sparkling light. Time seemed to stand still, and a voice spoke to him. “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself,” it said. “You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.” (In Fuller’s idiosyncratic English, “universe”—capitalized—is never preceded by the definite article.) It was at this point, according to Fuller, that he decided to embark on his “lifelong experiment.” The experiment’s aim was nothing less than determining “what, if anything,” an individual could do “on behalf of all humanity.” For this study, Fuller would serve both as the researcher and as the object of inquiry. (He referred to himself as Guinea Pig B, the “B” apparently being for Bucky.) Fuller moved his wife and daughter into a tiny studio in a Chicago slum and, instead of finding a job, took to spending his days in the library, reading Gandhi and Leonardo. He began to record his own ideas, which soon filled two thousand pages. In 1928, he edited the manuscript down to fifty pages, and had it published in a booklet called “4D Time Lock,” which he sent out to, among others, Vincent Astor, Bertrand Russell, and Henry Ford. Fuller was fond of neologisms. He coined the word “livingry,” as the opposite of “weaponry”— which he called “killingry”—and popularized the term “spaceship earth.” (He claimed to have invented “debunk,” but probably did not.) Another one of his coinages was “ephemeralization,” which meant, roughly speaking, “dematerialization.” Fuller was a strong believer in the notion that “less is more,” and not just in the aestheticized, Miesian sense of the phrase. He imagined that buildings would eventually be “ephemeralized” to such an extent that construction materials would be dispensed with altogether, and builders would instead
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rely on “electrical field and other utterly invisible environment controls.” Fuller’s favorite neologism, “dymaxion,” was concocted purely for public relations. When Marshall Field’s displayed his model house, it wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned “dymaxion” out of bits of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion.” Fuller was so taken with the word, which had no known meaning, that he adopted it as a sort of brand name. The Dymaxion House led to the Dymaxion Vehicle, which led, in turn, to the Dymaxion Bathroom and the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, essentially a grain bin with windows. As a child, Fuller had assembled scrapbooks of letters and newspaper articles on subjects that interested him; when, later, he decided to keep a more systematic record of his life, including everything from his correspondence to his dry-cleaning bills, it became the Dymaxion Chronofile. All the Dymaxion projects generated a great deal of hype, and that was clearly Fuller’s desire. All of them also flopped. The first prototype of the Dymaxion Vehicle had been on the road for just three months when it crashed. The Dymaxion Deployment Unit, which Fuller imagined being used as a mobile shelter, failed because after the United States entered the Second World War he could no longer obtain any steel. In 1945, Fuller attempted to mass-produce the Dymaxion House, entering into a joint effort with Beech Aircraft,
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which was based in Wichita. Two examples of the house were built before that project, too, collapsed. Following this string of disappointments, Fuller might have decided that his “experiment” had run its course. Instead, he kept right on going. Turning his attention to mathematics, he concluded that the Cartesian coördinate system had got things all wrong and invented his own system, which he called Synergetic Geometry. Synergetic Geometry was based on sixty-degree (rather than ninety-degree) angles, took the tetrahedron to be the basic building block of the universe, and avoided the use of pi, a number that Fuller found deeply distasteful. By 1948, Fuller’s geometric investigations had led him to the idea of the geodesic dome—essentially, a series of struts that could support a covering skin. Fuller and a team of students assembled a trial dome out of Venetianblind slats. Immediately upon being completed, the dome sagged and fell in on itself. (Some of the observers referred to it as a “flopahedron.”) Fuller insisted that this outcome had been intentional—he was, he said, trying to determine the critical point at
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which the dome would collapse—but no one seems to have believed this. The following year, Anne Fuller sold thirty thousand dollars’ worth of I.B.M. stock to finance Bucky’s continuing research, and in 1950 he succeeded in erecting a dome fifty feet in diameter. The geodesic dome is a prime example of “ephemeralization”; it can enclose more space with less material than virtually any other structure. The first commercial use of Fuller’s design came in 1953, when the Ford Motor Company decided to cover the central courtyard of its Rotunda building, in Dearborn. The walls of the building, which had been erected for a temporary exhibit, were not strong enough to support a conventional dome. Fuller designed a geodesic dome of aluminum struts fitted with fibreglass panes. The structure spanned ninety-three feet, yet weighed just eight and a half tons. It received a tremendous amount of press, almost all of it positive, with the result that geodesic domes soon became popular for all sorts of purposes. They seemed to spring up “like toadstools after a rain,” as one commentator put it.
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The geodesic dome transformed Fuller from an eccentric outsider into an eccentric insider. He developed a system for erecting temporary domes at trade fairs all around the world. Fuller was offered an appointment at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, and he had a domehome built near campus for himself and Anne. In 1965, he was commissioned by the United States Information Agency to design the U.S. Pavilion for the Montreal Expo. Though the exhibit inside was criticized as uninspiring, Fuller’s dome, which looked as if it were about to float free of the earth, was a hit. Fuller’s impact as a social theorist is equally ambiguous. He insisted that the future could be radically different from the past, that humanity was capable of finding solutions to the most intractable-seeming problems, and that the only thing standing in the way was the tendency to cling to
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old “piano tops.” But Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people’s capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. “I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult,” he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. “What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.” He was a material determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller’s greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely experiment that was Guinea Pig B. Instead of destroying himself, Fuller listened to Universe. He spent the next fifty years in a headlong, ceaseless act of self-assertion, one that took so many forms that, twenty-five years after his death, we are
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spacetime It was an unlikely place to be at 4:30 a.m., since I’m not much on celebrations and take minimal notice of most every holiday. Yet, a few years back, on a rainy Dec. 31 morning, I stood in Times Square, together with a handful of other early revelers, awaiting images on a giant screen of festivities on Kiribati, the first inhabited place on earth to welcome the new year. I was, as I recognized through the fog of exhaustion and the hazy steam billowing from manhole covers, re-enacting a struggle I’d been engaged in for decades. Time dominates experience. We live by watch and calendar. We eagerly trade megahertz for gigahertz. We spend billions of dollars to conceal time’s bodily influences. We uproariously celebrate particular moments in time even as we quietly despair of its passage. But what is time? To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it -- but certainly, a few years into the 21st century, our understanding of time must be deeper than that. By now, you’d think, science must have figured out why time seems to flow, why it always
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goes in one direction and why we are uniformly drawn from one second to the next. The fact is, though, the explanations for these basic features of time remain controversial. And the more physicists have searched for definitive answers, the more our everyday conception of time appears illusory. According to Isaac Newton, writing in the late 17th century, ‘’time flows equably without reference to anything external,’’ meaning that the universe is equipped with a kind of built-in clock that ticks off seconds identically, regardless of location or epoch. This is the intuitive perspective on time, so it’s no wonder that Newton’s words held sway for more than 200 years. In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert Einstein saw through nature’s Newtonian facade and revealed that the passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed that the wristwatches worn by two individuals moving relative to one another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in the eye of the beholder.
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Numerous terrestrial experiments and astronomical observations leave no doubt that Einstein was right. Nevertheless, because the flexibility of time’s passage becomes readily apparent only at high speeds (near the maximum possible speed, that of light) or in strong gravitational fields (near a black hole), nature lulls us into believing Newton’s rigid conception. And so it’s not surprising that nearly 100 years after Einstein’s breakthroughs, it remains a great challenge, even for physicists, to internalize his discoveries fully. But the cost of adhering to Newton’s description of time is high. Like believing the earth flat or that man was created on the sixth day, our willingness to place unjustified faith in immediate perception or received wisdom leads us to an inaccurate and starkly limited vision of reality. For one thing, relativity lays out a blueprint for time-travel to the future. Were you to board a spaceship, head out from earth at 99.999999 percent of light speed, travel for six months and then head back home at the same speed, your motion would slow your clock, relative to those that remain stationary on earth, so
that you’d be one year older upon your return — while everyone on earth would have aged about 7,000 years. Or, were you to venture into space again and spend a year hovering a dozen feet above the edge of a black hole, whose mass was 1,000 times that of the sun, the strong gravitational field would slow your clock so much that on your return to earth, you’d find that more than a million years had elapsed. To be sure, executing this strategy for catapulting yourself forward in time is beyond what we can now achieve, but scientists routinely use high-energy accelerators to propel particles, like electrons and protons, to nearly the speed of light, slowing their internal clocks and thereby sending them to the future. Though unfamiliar, forward time-travel is an unavoidable feature of relativistic reality. Relativity also upends the way we traditionally organize reality. Most of us imagine that reality consists of everything that exists right now — everything that would be found, say, on a hypothetical freeze-frame image of the universe at this moment. The history of reality could thus be depicted by stacking one such freeze-frame
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image on top of the one that came before it, creating a cosmic version of an old-time flipbook. But this intuitive conception assumes a universal now, another stubborn remnant of Newton’s absolutist thinking. Let me explain. Clocks that are in relative motion or that are subject to different gravitational fields tick off time at different rates; the more these factors come into play, the further out of synchronization the clocks will fall. Individuals carrying such clocks will therefore not agree on what happens when, and so they will not agree on what belongs on a given page of the cosmic flip-book — even though each flip-book provides an equally valid compendium of history.
Under these rules, what constitutes a moment in time is completely subjective. This is unfamiliar, and hence hard to accept, because we all experience the same gravitational field (the earth’s), we all travel extremely slowly compared to light’s speed (even the space shuttle never comes close to exceeding a ten-thousandth of light speed) and we all compare our conception of reality to beings who, by cosmic standards, are nearby. But by using our understanding to relax these measures, if only hypothetically, we learn that our experiences belie the truth. For example, if you and I were sitting next to each other, our freeze-frame images of the present would be identical. But were you to SUN_
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start walking, the mathematics of relativity shows that the subsequent pages of your flipbook would rotate so that each one of your new pages would angle across many of mine; what you’d consider one moment in time — your new notion of the present — would include events I’d claim to have happened at different times, some earlier and some later. As we pass each other in the street, this rotation is imperceptibly tiny; that’s why common experience fails to reveal the discrepancy between our respective senses of past, present and future. But just as a tiny angular shift will cause a rocket to miss a distant target by a large margin, the tiny angular shift between our notions of now results in a significant time discrepancy if our separation in space is substantial. If instead of being next to me, you were 10 light years away (and moving at about 9.5 miles an hour), what you consider to have happened just now on earth would include events that I’d experienced about four seconds later or earlier
(depending on whether your motion was toward or away from earth). If you were 10 billion light years away, the time discrepancy would jump to about 141 years. In this latter case, your subsequent flipbook pages, your notion of the present -- a notion that agreed with mine until you started walking -- would include Abraham Lincoln on the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect (if you walked away from me), or the victor of the hotly contested presidential election of 2144 preparing for his inaugural (if you walked toward me). That’s not to say that you could save Lincoln’s life or analyze mid-22nd century American presidential politics; at such enormous distances it takes signals, even traveling at light speed, a long time to make the trip. But the point is that even ordinary motion, when considered over vast distances, results in a marked change in our conception of reality, revealing how thoroughly subjective the temporal categories of past, present and future actually are.
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“the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.’’ In a very specific way, then, this realization shatters our comfortable sense that the past is gone, the future is yet to be and the present is what truly exists. Einstein was not hardened to the difficulty of absorbing such a profound change in perspective. Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, recounts Einstein’s telling him that ‘’the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.’’ And later, in a condolence letter to the widow of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein wrote: ‘’In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn’t mean anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.’’ Some physicists and historians see these as declarations laced with poignant hyperbole. Perhaps they are. It’s hard to know whether Einstein was ‘’convinced’’ to such a deep level that he had remolded his emotional sense of time to reflect his understanding of relativistic reality. But regardless of whether Einstein had succeeded, his remarks articulated the challenge -- to allow carefully reasoned and experimentally verified investigations of the universe, however discomfiting their conclusions, to inform our lives with the same force as experience. When quantum mechanics, the tremendously successful theory of atoms and subatomic particles, is taken into account, the challenge becomes greater still. Quantum mechanics has, at its core, the uncertainty principle, which establishes a limit on how precisely particular features of the microworld can be simultaneously measured. The more precise the measurement of one feature (a particle’s position for example), the more wildly uncertain a
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complementary feature (its velocity) becomes. Quantum uncertainty thus ensures that the finer the examination of the microworld, the more frantically its physical features fluctuate, and the more turbulent it appears to be. For subatomic particles, these fluctuations are well understood mathematically and have been precisely documented experimentally. But when it comes to time and space, the fluctuations speak to the very limits of these familiar concepts. On extremely short time intervals (about a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) and distance scales (about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter), quantum fluctuations so mangle space and time that the conventional ideas of left/right, backward/forward, up/down, and before/after become meaningless. Scientists are still struggling to understand these implications, but many agree that just as the percentages in political polls are average, approximate measures that become meaningful only when a large respondent pool is canvassed, so conventional notions of time and space are also average, approximate concepts that become meaningful only when considered over sufficiently large scales. Whereas relativity established the subjectivity of time’s passage, quantum mechanics challenges the conceptual primacy of time itself. Today’s scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic ‘’realm’’ that is itself devoid of time and space.
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