Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Time is the thing we trust most and the thing we understand least. We start with a deceptively simple question: how long is one day? From there, we unpack why solar time and sidereal time disagree by about four minutes, and how that tiny gap reshapes the night sky over a year and helps astronomers aim telescopes where they actually need to look. 

Then we zoom out to the human side of timekeeping: calendars, power, and the quiet truth that “what year it is” depends on who’s counting. We talk Gregorian vs Julian history, other calendar systems around the world, and the way our “official” dates can collide with real life logistics. That leads straight into daylight saving time, where we lay out the strongest case for shifting evening daylight and the strongest case against it: circadian rhythm, sleep disruption, and the measurable risks that show up when we force the clock to jump. 

From there, time gets physical. We tell the story of Britain deleting eleven days in 1752, the race to solve longitude with John Harrison’s sea watch, and the artifacts that make deep time touchable. Then things get wonderfully strange. Scientists flew atomic clocks around the world—and they came back disagreeing with the clocks that stayed home, just as Einstein predicted, plus isolation cave experiments that reveal how quickly our internal clock drifts without sunrise and sunset. We end in the biggest questions of all: the arrow of time, entropy, why we can turn around in space but not in time, and why stories about time travel hit so hard when real life won’t rewind. If you like big ideas grounded in everyday reality, subscribe, share this with a curious friend, leave a review, and tell us: what’s your personal theory for why time feels faster as you get older?

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Transcript

A Noisy Car And A Big Question

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Lillian in the car, she screamed like it's a birthday or something. But her birthday's in April, not November. Sound is good. Hey folks, it's just that she likes to sing, but the radio is

Why Time Gets Strange Fast

SPEAKER_02 0:22

off.

SPEAKER_05 0:22

Last week we delved into the nature of stuff. You know the everyday reality of objects around the house and the questions that they ask. This week I'm gonna put a different slide on the microscope and we're gonna talk about time. What is it? Is it a real thing? I mean, basically, a discussion about humans trying to catch time in a jar with saladongs. Watches, calendars, appointments, the phrase, I'll be there in five minutes, which is almost never true. Those are things we live with every day that help us understand where we are in time. Right? I mean, time feels like the most basic thing in the world. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, my knees make a noise when I stand up, and somehow it's time to close the pool again. But the more you look at time, the stranger it gets. We argued about clocks, we built monuments to the sun. We named months after emperors, days after gods. And now we all carry little glowing rectangles that tell us we're late to things we didn't want to do in the first place. Welcome or welcome back to the Anne Levine show with Michael over there. Hello. Today we're talking about people and our ideas about time. I mean, we speak as though we know things about time. But do we really? Let me ask you this.

Solar Day Versus Sidereal Day

SPEAKER_05 2:20

How long is one day? Now I promise you right now, your answer's gonna be right. But here's the weird part. It's not the only correct answer. Because in this situation, your point of view really makes the entire difference. Because very likely your answer was in solar time. That's the kind of time we use every day. And it's based on the sun. You would, you know, of course. When the sun is highest in the sky, we call that uh noon, right? And then the earth keeps spinning, and the sun looks like it's moving across the sky, it sets, then the night happens. Eventually the sun comes back again, and one full solar day is how long it takes for the sun to get back to that same position in the sky. And that's about 24 hours, and that's about as normal as it gets. But here comes a sciencey part. There is a different kind of time. Sidereal time is based not on the sun, but it's based on the stars. And it sounds very sciencey, but it's really easily explained. The word sidereal comes from a word that means star. So a sidereal day is the time it takes Earth to spin once so that the stars appear in the same position in the sky again. And this is where it gets a little wonky because a sidereal day is not 24 hours. It's about 23 hours, 56 minutes, four minutes shorter than a regular day. And four minutes might not sound like a whole lot, but in astronomy, four minutes is a really big deal. Right? I mean, but they're different. Why? Okay, great question. Imagine in your mind the earth is a spinning basketball, and every day the earth spins around one time. And that spin makes the sun and the stars appear to rise in the east and set in the west. But the earth is not doing only that, it's doing more than one thing at one time. We're multitasking, folks. While it is spinning on its axis, and that's the thing to pay attention to here, it's also in orbit around the sun. So it's moving, it's not in the same place every day. So after the earth makes one full spin compared to the distant stars, it's also moving along its orbit to the sun. And that means the earth has to turn just the littlest bit more before the sun appears in the same place in the sky again. And that little extra turn takes about four minutes. So compared to the stars, the earth spins once in 23 hours, 56 minutes. And compared to the sun, the earth needs about 24 hours. Boom. There's your difference. Now, um, which one is the real time, you may ask yourself? Well, here's here's the fun answer. They're both real, and they're both useful for different things. Because solar time is the clock of the people, and sidereal time is the clock of the stars. Does it matter? Yeah, I think it does. I think it matters because time is not just something on your phone. Time is a way of describing the motion of the Earth. We know what solar time does, it gives us days, schedules, time zones, calendars. But sidereal time helps astronomers point telescopes. Because if you want to look at Saturn or the Orion Nebula or a galaxy millions of light years away, you need to know when that object's gonna be in the right place in the sky. Because your telescope can't point everywhere. And because the stars rise about four minutes earlier each night, the night sky changes very slowly throughout the whole year. And you may have noticed this because Orion in the wintertime is very easy to see in the evening sky. But in the summer, it's not in the same place at the same hour. And Orion didn't move. And we're still spinning at the same speed, but the night sky is different because the earth moved a little bit around the sun. That's science.

Calendars And Who Names The Year

SPEAKER_05 7:27

So who gets to decide what year it is? Right? Some cultures count from uh religious events or like the beginnings or ends of dynasties, creation cycles, lunar phases. I mean, 2026 is not the universe's timestamp, it's one calendar's opinion. And there have been a lot of calendars. The one we use right now was introduced in 1582 under Pope Gregory VIII. That's our modern January to December calendar. And before that, we had the Julian calendar, which was introduced by Julius Caesar, obviously, a very long time ago. Now, China uses a combination lunar solar calendar for their traditional festivals and for astrology and for like cultural observances, but they use the Gregorian calendar for their everyday civil life. Ethiopian calendars have 13 months, and I think one of the months only has a few days in it, and it's several years different from the Gregorian calendar. So imagine you're an Ethiopian and you're traveling around, and your passport says that it expired in 2025. So you have a problem. Except in Ethiopia, 2025 is eight years away. So it can be weird. And then there's the ancient Egyptian calendar, it's the one that had 365 days and really influenced, you know, later calendar thinking. The big one, of course, which was in the Zeitgeist not long ago, was the Mayan calendars, which aren't really, it's not really a calendar, it's a system. There's the uh Tsolkenhab and the long count, and they're famous for tracking, you know, the time for rituals, solar cycles, uh, and of course, every so often uh predicting the end of the world. And finally, um the French Republican calendar. After the French Revolution, uh a new calendar was instituted that renamed the months, changed how weeks were set up, and it tried to make time a bit more rational and less religious. It didn't last. It went for a few years and it disappeared. And then, ta-da! For one brilliant shining moment, it came back again, and I think it lasted for like 17 days or something like that. It just people have a hard time changing things like what day it is. Sometimes. Because while we've imposed our idea of what time should be, just by adding or changing calendars willy-nilly, it's not been enough. Oh no, a large number of human beings have decided that we are in charge of not just months, oh no, not even narrowed down days and not even single hours. We're in charge of all of it. The Gregorian calendar adds a day every four years, and twice a year, huge numbers of people pretend that when you change a clock, the world, the reality of the world changes. I mean, for a long time, I thought it was mainly the US and Canada that observed daylight savings time, but I was way off. Um, 70 countries around the world, about 34%, do this maniacal thing. I mean, the sky's getting bright at 5 a.m. Who's that helping? Farm robots? I don't know. But I do have more questions.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.

SPEAKER_05 11:56

And I'm all out of bubblegum. So let's talk about daylight savings time.

Daylight Saving Time On Trial

SPEAKER_05 12:01

And let's think of the rational reason to keep it. And I think that would be that it takes usable daylight in to the part of the day when more people are awake and off work, and they might be out shopping or exercising, you know, walk walking dogs or I don't know, coaching a little league or something like that. Driving home, even. I think that's the best argument to keep it. In the summer, uh sunrise may happen really stupidly early under standard time, right? So in Massachusetts, for example, without daylight savings time, some June sunrises would be around four in the morning, instead around five. Most people are asleep at four in the morning. I'm not, but that's okay. So daylight is really kind of wasted for ordinary social life. It just is. So, what daylight savings time does is it shifts that hour to the evening when people are actually going to use it. So, here's our most rational pro-daylight savings time argument. Since most people are awake and active later in the day than they are at dawn. Daylight saving time plus sunlight, you know, that's where modern life can use it. And there are other secondary arguments that go along with it, like more evening hours might support outdoor recreation or uh more shopping, maybe. And perceived public safety. People tend to think that you're safer when it's lighter outside. The U.S. uh Department of Transportation has historically said daylight savings time provides an additional hour of evening daylight, and older analyses found modest benefits like uh in areas like energy, right? People aren't using their lights as much, safety, and crime reduction, though uh the strength of those cases is fairly debated. In 2008, uh the Department of Energy study found only about a 0.02% reduction in total electricity use. That's almost, I mean, that's really nothing. And it really had no measurable impact on gasoline consumption. So let's uh let's clean this up and we'll and we'll put it this way. Evening daylight is more useful to people than very early morning daylight. Right? That seems to be what the argument is at its base. So let's talk about the reasons, the rational reasons to eliminate daylight savings time. And the rational argument is stronger, I think, if we're talking about health, biology, and you know, social stability. Changing the clocks twice a year disrupts people's sleep and body rhythms for no good reason. Humans are not just clocks with shoes. We have circadian rhythms, you know, it means our bodies respond to light and to darkness. The morning light helps wake us up and anchor our body. The evening light delays the sleep. And then daylight savings time pushes sunlight later, and it makes our social clock less aligned with our biological clock. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's position is that the United States should eliminate seasonal time changes and use permanent standard time. Because permanent standard time aligns better with human circadian biology. So the rational anti-day daylight savings time argument is the benefits are small, they're uncertain, while the clock changes cause real disruption to sleep, to health, to scheduling, obviously, and safety. I mean, there is evidence linking the transition times to daylight savings or off, especially the one in the spring, uh, with increased risks like traffic accidents and cardiovascular events. One cited analysis found a rise in fatal traffic accidents after the spring transition. I think the best argument for daylight savings time is social, right? More evening daylight when people can use it. And the best argument against it is biological. I mean, if an hour extra hour of light in the evening is the benefit, is it better to follow rather than disrupt your biological rhythms? I mean, is it worth it? How do you fare through this if you have to go through daylight savings time to switch every year? I mean, are there any specific things you do to try and negate these effects? I almost always miss an appointment on the next day. Something that was supposed to have happened. I'm either uh I mean, I'm I usually miss it or I'm absurdly early or late. I don't know, I never get it right. Some people do, some people can do it. I'm not one of those people. But you know what? We just have to mess with time. It seems to be part of the human condition.

When Britain Deleted Eleven Days

SPEAKER_05 18:00

Let me tell you a story. In 1752, the people of Great Britain and its colonies went to bed on Sun on Wednesday, sorry, September 2, and they woke up the next day, Thursday, September 14th. Eleven days disappeared. They were gone. And not metaphorically, not in a poetic sort of way, no, they were gone from the calendar. And here's why. Britain had been using the Julian calendar, and it was a pretty good calendar, but it had a tiny problem. It was just a little bit too long, and not by much, and this might surprise you. It was wrong by about 11 minutes a year. That sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? 11 minutes? I mean, it's barely enough time to find your keys and realize your coffee's still in the microwave. Now, time is sneaky, though. 11 minutes a year becomes hours. And hours become days. And after many centuries, the calendar had simply drifted out of step with the seasons. So the Catholic world had already switched to the Gregorian calendar back in 1582, as you can imagine, since it was the Pope who did it. But Protestant Britain resisted it for a really long time, partially because it was seen as a Catholic invention. But eventually practicality won over everybody. Trade and shipping, legal contracts, astronomy, and the basic what day is it? Sanity. Sort of required everyone to get on the same page. So Britain made the change. The law said that after September 2nd, 1752, the next day would be September 14th. Imagine being born on September 8th, which would really, really tick my son off because that is his birthday. Sorry, you don't get a birthday this year. Imagine you your rent is due on September 10th. Does the day exist? Do you still owe the rent? Do you get a discount? I mean, there's a famous story that people rioted in the streets of London saying, give us our eleven days. I mean, that exact version is probably exaggerated and you know, maybe even mostly a legend, but the confusion was real. People worried about wages, rents, birthdays, taxes, and age. Because calendars aren't just numbers, they are the handmade rickety scaffolding of ordinary life. And that's what makes this such a great time story. We think time is natural. The sun rises, the moon changes, the seasons turn. But the calendar, we we forget that that's a human machine. And in 1752, the British government reached into the machine, grabbed 11 little gears, and tossed them. Not because time stopped, but because people underground finally realized that their map of time no longer matched what was in the sky.

John Harrison And Longitude By Clock

SPEAKER_05 21:52

A long time ago, in a galaxy exactly like this one, a young man named John Harrison. Was born. John Harrison followed in his father's footsteps and he became a carpenter. But he built and repaired clocks in his spare time. Now the legend has it that at when he was six years old while he was in bed with smallpox, John was given a watch to kind of keep him busy to amuse himself while he just laid there. And he spent hours listening to it and studying its parts. John built his first long case clock in 1713 at the age of 20. And he kept working on clocks and improving the performance of the pendulum clock. While John was alive, sailors had a problem. Sailors knew latitude, but they could not reliably determine longitude. Ships got lost. Empires lost fortunes. Thousands of people died. And then John Harrison decided he could solve the problem. And the scientific establishment laughed at him. He then set out to solve the problem directly by producing a reliable clock that could keep the time of reference place accurately over long intervals without having to constantly adjust it. And the difficulty he had was producing a clock that wasn't affected by variations in temperature or pressure or humidity or corrosion and had to be able to function on a constantly moving ship. It took him five years to build his first sea clock, and it kind of worked. It lost time on the outgoing voyage when it was being tested, but it performed really well on the return trip. That wasn't enough for John, though. His research had to continue for the next 25 years. And he spent decades building increasingly insane clocks. And the result ultimately was his H4 Sea Watch clock, which basically became the basis for all sea travel after that. Because they could finally figure out where they were. Because they knew what time it was back home, and they could calculate by what they were seeing in the sky exactly where they were and how far they were away. It's just is brilliant. I love it. Let's talk about another one.

Footprints, Temples, And Sky Records

SPEAKER_05 25:12

This is a great story. I love this one because I've seen photographs. I've never been there yet, but you know, I would I would love to do this. But the Laetoli footprints. A human ancestor walks across some wet volcanic ash about three and a half million years ago. That's the whole story. That's it. There's no king. There's no battle. There's no treasure. It's just footprints. I mean, the thing that gets me is that footprints are really ordinary. We all leave them on the beach in the snow. Through the kitchen when we should have wiped our feet. I just earlier today took a picture of my dog's footprints on my porch because sh it was wet outside. And she walked across the porch and left these beautiful little paw prints. But these footprints, they turned into a message from almost four million years ago. Saying someone passed this way. I mean, who were they? Where the heck were they headed? Did they make it there? Was it the first time? Was it a regular trip they made and they just happened to pass through this mud that time? I mean the questions are wonderful because they lead to more questions and give your imagination something to dance around in for a while. So let's talk about the Gebekli Teppe. This is in Turkey. And people who study these kinds of things have suggested that in the development of human civilization, that farming came first, and then temples. But Gebekli Tepa suggests that people may have gathered for ritual and community long before they started farming. Gebekli Tepa is a Neolithic archaeological site in modern-day Turkey, and it was inhabited from around 9500 BCE to at least 8,000 BCE. Evidence indicates that the inhabitants there were hunter-gatherers who supplemented their diet with early forms of like domesticated cereal, and they lived in villages for at least part of the year. They found tools like grinding stones, mortars, pestles. They've been analyzed and they suggest, you know, yeah, they did a lot of cereal processing. They did a lot of grain grinding. And archaeozoological evidence hints that there was large-scale hunting of gazelle between midsummer and autumn. There was little to no evidence of religion, and there was a great deal of art, mostly carved stone. The archaeologists have long associated that the appearance of the settlement, along with several others, with the Neolithic revolution, the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, but they disagree on whether the adoption of farming caused people to settle down, or settling down caused people to adopt farming. And so far, at least from this particular site, it looks like settle first, farm second to me. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, so really, civilization may not have started because someone said, Let's grow wheat. It may have started because someone said, Hey, let's all gather over there and build something that matters. The Nebra Sky Disc is a bronze disc. Uh it's around 12 inches in diameter, and it weighs almost five pounds. And it's got a blue-green patina, and it's inlaid with these gold symbols. And the symbols, I mean, most people are uh have interpreted them as the sun or the full moon or or the you know, like a lunar, a crescent moon, stars, including a cluster of seven stars. And um that's been sort of people are like, oh, that's the Pleiades. There are two golden arcs that go along the sides. One of them's missing now, but uh they're these things are thought to have marked the angle between solstices. Another arc at the bottom that has some internal parallel lines is usually interpreted like a solar boat with numerous oars. And some people have suggested it might be a rainbow or the aurora borealis or a comet. In 1999, the disc was found buried on the Middleburg hill near Nebra in Germany. It's dated by archaeologists back to like 1800 to 1600 BC and attributed to the early Bronze Age. It features like the oldest concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena known from anywhere in the world. And UNESCO's called it one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century. I mean, before your phone told you that it was 713 and it was raining, the sky was the app. The moon was your notification, the stars were the calendar, and that soggy willow tree over there that was telling you it's raining. Archaeology makes time physical. You know, you can touch it in bone, ash, bronze, even footprints.

Time Delay And Einstein In The Air

SPEAKER_05 32:30

Here's another strange thing about time. When we look at the sun, and we've already talked about this, we often feel we can see the time from where the sun is in the sky. Indeed, that is exactly how we all perceive it. And we're all wrong. When you see the sun in the sky, you're actually kind of time traveling. The sun you see isn't the sun as it is. It's what the sun was eight minutes ago. It takes that long for the light to get here. And to dive in even deeper inside your own body. It takes about a hundred and forty milliseconds for your brain to register that you've heard something. And it takes up to three hundred milliseconds for it to notice something visually and be able to re react to it. We're all kind of behind time. So one of the things that our brain does is it tries to predict what's going to happen next. That's a big part of what optical illusions are about. But let's get back to time. In 1971, there were two physicists uh named uh Joseph Haffala and Richard Keating, and they had an idea that sounded really kind of crazy. Because Einstein had predicted that time is not the same everywhere. It depends on how fast you're moving and how strong gravity is. So, how do you go about proving something like that? Well, I'll tell you how. You put clocks on planes and not uh not metaphorical clocks, real atomic clocks. The kind the kind of clock that is so accurate that it loses only about one second every few million years. Hafla and Keating borrowed four cesium beam atomic clocks from the U.S. Naval Observatory, and they put them in padded crates. They bought tickets on ordinary commercial airliners, and they literally flew the clocks around the world. How about that? One flew, one set flew east, another set flew west, and meanwhile, matching clocks stayed behind at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Now, here's where it gets weird. Because according to Einstein, two different effects should be competing with each other. The airplanes were moving very fast compared with the Earth. And special relativity says moving clocks will run slow. But the planes were also cruising about six miles above the Earth, and general relativity says that clocks further away from Earth's gravity will run fast. So the clocks weren't just moving, they're also higher up. So one of the effects tried to slow the clocks down, and the other effect tried to speed them up. And so the question is, who wins, right? Well, Einstein did the math years and years before. Eastbound clocks should lose time. Westbound clocks should gain time. So the physicists finished their flights and they unpacked the clocks and they compared them with the ones that never left Washington, D.C. And the clocks disagreed with each other. And not by seconds, not by milliseconds, but by billionths of a second. Very tiny. But exactly in the Mount Einstein predicted. And the eastbound clocks lost time, the westbound clocks gained time. It was not a malfunction. It was not a measurement error. It was time itself. Those clocks lived slightly different lives. And since then, we've repeated experiments like this over and over with far more precise equipments. And every time Einstein wins. Think about that for a moment. If you and I stood together at an airport, synchronized our watches, and then I spent the next week flying around the world while you stayed home, or if you prefer, you can be the one doing the traveling and I'll stay home. That's fine. We don't have to argue about that. But one of us is traveling, one of us is staying home. When we met again, our watches would no longer agree perfectly. And the difference would be really tiny. Far too small, you know, for us to notice, but it would be real. We would literally have experienced different amounts of time. Not because the clocks were wrong, but because time isn't as absolute as it feels. And this experiment didn't prove that the clocks were different. It proved that the time they experienced was different. Now, that leads me to another question.

Caves, Circadian Rhythms, And Drift

SPEAKER_05 38:26

Does being human give us any extra abilities at understanding what time it is? I mean, are we good at tracking time just because we're people? Well, a French geologist named Michael Siffre became famous in 1962 when he spent about two months alone in a glacier cave in the French Alps. He didn't have a clock, no daylight, no radio, no calendar, no human contact. His only job was to call researchers on the surface whenever he woke up or went to sleep. They never told him what time it was. And the surprise? Well, he expected to lose track of the date, but he did not expect to lose track of time itself. When he thought one minute had passed, often five actual minutes had gone by. When he thought he'd been underground for about a month, he'd actually been there much longer. So when the researchers finally ended the experiment, Sifra believed that it was August 20th. But it was actually September 14th. And no, they didn't get rid of 11 days this time. He had actually lost nearly a month. Other people tried this experiment. Several similar isolation kind of things happened. One particularly interesting subject was a young woman named Veronica Le Guin. She spent months underground in the late 1970s. And like Cifra, her sleep schedule drifted. And instead of living on a 24-hour day, she kind of settled into more of a 25-hour day, sometimes even longer. Without sunrise and sunset, hey, the human body begins following its own internal rhythm. And like we mentioned before, when you start moving the clocks around, that can really mess up your internal rhythm. What scientists really learned was that we do have an internal biological clock, but it's not perfect. It's more like a wristwatch that gains a little time every day. Normally, sunset or sunlight resets it every morning. But without the daylight, it kind of drifts. And the really eerie part about these experiments were that the peoples in the studies often stopped caring what day it was. The days blended together and weeks really became meaningless. And time became something that they felt rather than something they measured. Most of the participants reported that time seemed simultaneously very slow and very fast. Individual days felt endless. Months disappeared so quickly. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Because a lot of retirees or astronauts, or even people during COVID lockdowns, they reported things that were very, very similar. You know, we think clocks tell us what time it is, but maybe clocks don't tell us time at all. Maybe clocks really are there to keep us all agreeing about what time it is.

Entropy And The Arrow Of Time

SPEAKER_05 42:29

Why is time different from space? I know that sounds a little silly. Because I mean, they obviously they're very different, right? Well uh physics really isn't so sure. I mean, right now, you could stand up. You could walk three feet to the left or five feet to the right, or forward or backwards. Space gives you choices. You can move in almost any direction you like. You can jump and move up. But now trying to to do the same thing with time. Go five minutes into tomorrow or back to breakfast. You can't. Every second carries you relentlessly forward. Time appears to have a preferred direction, but the question is really, why? I mean, before Einstein, people thought of space and time as two completely separate things. Space, that's where things are. Time, that's when things happened. But Einstein showed us they're really part of one four dimensional fabric we call space time. And in that picture, your life is like a path through four dimensions. Three of them are space, one of them is time. So, if they're woven together, why does one of them behave so very differently, right? Physicist Richard Feynman loved asking questions that seemed almost childish, and one of them was essentially I'll paraphrase why can I turn around in space, but not in time? And it's really such a simple question that it sounds almost naive, but no one really knows the answer. The strange part is the laws of physics don't seem to care very much. Imagine watching two billiard balls collide. Now, run the film backwards. It still obeys the laws of physics. But imagine the earth orbiting the sun. Run it backwards. Oh, still works. Even the equations describing gravity don't object to that. Many of the fundamental questions or in equations in physics work almost equally, whether time runs forward or backwards. So where does this directional arrow come from? And scientists think it has less to do with physics and more to do with entropy. And entropy is often described as disorder, basically. Or more accurately, it's the number of ways something can be arranged. A broken egg has vastly more possible arrangements than an unbroken egg. Cream mixes into coffee, smoke will spread through a room, ice melts. These processes happen naturally in one direction. That increasing entropy seems to give time its arrow. But wait, here's the mystery. Entropy may explain why we remember yesterday instead of tomorrow. It may explain why glasses break instead of, you know, spontaneously reassembling. But entropy does not explain why there is a time dimension at all. Or that you know, why we can only move through it one way. That's really still unknown. So imagine this. Suppose you were a two-dimensional character living on a sheet of paper. You could move north, south, east, west. Now imagine someone tells you there's another direction and it's called up. You can't even picture it. I mean, maybe. Maybe just our relationship to time is equally sort of limited. Perhaps we're simply creatures who can only experience one direction through a much richer reality. And no one knows. Maybe and maybe the deepest mystery isn't whether time travel is possible. Maybe it's why time is so different from every other direction in the universe. We take it for granted because we've never experienced anything else. Fish don't wonder what water is. And maybe we don't wonder about time often enough.

Movies That Let Us Escape Time

SPEAKER_05 47:33

Now we're gonna move into uh entertainment time. It's entertainment time, folks. Here's an here's an opinion I got. Tell me what you think. Entertainment often plays with time because we as humans are obsessed with escaping it. Let's talk about a few of them. Groundhog Day. To me, the perfect comedy. One of the perfect movies, I think. But it's a comedy about being trapped in time until you become a better person. And we've got Back to the Future. That's time uh as adventure, family family therapy, and it's a warning not to flirt with your mother. The time machine, the H.G. Wells story and the movies that have been made of it. That's time travel as social commentary. I mean, what happens if the future isn't shiny, but it's horrifying? And probably the greatest time story ever. A Christmas Carol. Every color of the time rainbow in there is used as a moral intervention for one guy. Look, if you're interested in the whole time travely thing, you could do these activities. Check out Time Cop. It's a movie from 1994 with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ron Silver. It's uh it's not winning any awards, folks, but it's fun. Or uh maybe that's not your thing, pick up a book and read 1122, 1963. It's by Stephen King. And it's a very strange, very cool time travel story about a man traveling back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And if you're interested, here's another movie from 2006 with Adam Sandler. It's called Click. It's about a man who finds that his remote control can pause, rewind, skip actual time. And what happens to someone who's been given that ability? Fiction lets us do what real life won't. Right? We rewind, pause, skip ahead, ask for another take. I don't know. Is that a good thing?

Aging, Loss, And Objects That Remember

SPEAKER_05 50:43

Here's a very old man kind of phrase. The older you get, the faster time moves. It's a cliche at this point, you know, something so commonly said that it really seems irrelevant, but it's not. It's the truth. And why it's the truth, I don't know, but it is observably the way the work world works as a human. I mean, for example, here. As a kid, summer lasts forever. 104 days of summer vacation. And the end was always a surprise. It came so fast. I mean, as an adult, you open the pool at the end of May where I live, spend the weekend with a nor'easter coming through, and then it's October and it's time to close the pool. And after loss, time does something even stranger. The person's gone. But they're also right there. One of the strange things about time is that people will not stay in only one part of it. Someone can be gone from the present and still be completely alive in your Wednesday morning. In a phrase in the fragrance of nearly burning toast and or in the way you turn to tell them something. Photographs or little time machines. Old radio shows or voices refusing to disappear. Objects hold time. A ring, a watch, a postcard, a a piece of jewelry. They are not just things. They are when made visible. I mean they're sometimes memories. Sometimes they actually transport you back to a time and a place. And sometimes they remind you of things perhaps unpleasant or uncomfortable. They hold time in one place. But they can't stop it.

Trying To Catch Time In A Jar

SPEAKER_05 53:04

And really, maybe that's all I've been trying to do today, you know? Catch time in a jar. I mean, we might even have our designer salad tongs. But we won't stop time. Nothing can. But maybe, you know, just maybe. Someone years from now. Sometimes I'll uh look back and remember what it feels like to have been here at this time. The friend I have and met, but somehow says And for Ann Lamine, I think it's time to put a light on.

SPEAKER_04 53:44

Put a light on that shine through.

SPEAKER_03 54:07

Make it true empty filled with memories. I don't know, but somehow understand the way to every stranger passing by could be the one to take the light inside my heart.