Time and tempo
NY City public radio started this series called Radio Lab. This is a summary of a fascinating discussion on time that I had to capture somewhere. What better place than here?
Time was a very personal concept back in the middle of the 19th century. Cities throughout the country had their local time that was synchronized to the day, so at noon it was pretty much 12 o'clock no matter where in the country you were. Even within a locality though, there were different times. So when the railroad was introduced, the question became "whose time should we choose?" Would it be the bank's time or the grocer's whose clock ran 10mins ahead of the banker, or the bar, whose clock was 10mins slower than the bank. So, for the sake of it's own business, the Railways introduced their own clocks and prominently displayed them at each railway station. As it turned out, the businesses soon found it necessary to synch up with the railway clocks - the banks because they got cash by train, the markets because the trains delivered their groceries, and the hotels and bars because their customers arrived by train. But all was not well immediately and there was significant opposition to giving up the local time in areas where, say, noon was not at 12 o'clock according to the new "railway time". There were protests and splits in the same town. One fraction would be going by the railway time, the other by the older local time. Of course, we all know who eventually won this battle. It is interesting that we often ardently fight for the most dear causes, yet, as time goes by and technology shapes our future in ways previously unimaginable, these causes seem almost silly. There are some things I feel strongly about but where should I fight to maintain the statusquoe and where should I let events take their own course?
The other story is about the advent of the first high-speed photography. It actually came out of a simple bet (historians dispute whether money was actually involved but the story is true). Leland Stanford Jr. (of Stanford University) had made his money in transportation with the advent of railroads. An argument once came up, whether or not a galloping horses' all four feet are ever in air simultaneously. How to resolve the issue? The horse moved too fast for human eyes to discern the motion. So Stanford hired a photographer, Moire, to get some answers. At that time, shutter speed of cameras was far too slow to capture this motion needing 1-2 sec to keep the shutter open. Moire required 5 hundredths of a second shutter speed to image a galloping horse. He eventually succeeded in building such a camera. He then placed a trip wire on a race track that was connected to a camera shutter. So as the horse came galloping by, sure enough it tripped the wire and in that instant the camera imaged it. Moire went a step further and set up 24 trip wires in close proximity, each controlling to the shutter of a different camera. Eventually Moire got slices of time captured in a sequence and resolved the issue once and for all - yes, a galloping horse's four feet are in air at the same time [the original frames].
Human tempo: We know from the theory of relativity that time is not a constant in the universe. It is a function of your frame of reference, so, an observer and a speeding astronaut have two very different idea of the passage of time. On earth, in our existence far from the speed of light, we also have different perceptions of time, and that is manifested as tempo of the human body. Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist, once had a patient who was astounding in his understanding of time. His body tempo was so slow that he almost appeared frozen in time. A simple act of wiping nose takes one about 2 seconds. For this patient it took 2 hours. Dr. Sacks set up a still picture camera to take pictures every few minutes of the patient in the act of wiping his nose. In all the camera took 24 pictures and then the good doctor put them in a binder so they can be flipped demonstrating one action. The patient explained that he found no odd behavior in the passage of time but when he was shown the picture book, the patient was thunderstruck. How could that be?
The flip side of this story is a fast tempo and a female patient of Dr. Sacks had just this problem. While the best Olympic athletes have a reaction time of tenth of a second, hers was 0.07secs. Dr. Sacks set her down in front of some of her students seated in a semicircular formation and asked them to play catch. The students were to throw a ball at her and she was to catch the ball and throw it back. She would catch each ball and throw it back so rapidly, the poor students, still with their throwing arm in the air, would be severely hit with the returning ball.
Time was a very personal concept back in the middle of the 19th century. Cities throughout the country had their local time that was synchronized to the day, so at noon it was pretty much 12 o'clock no matter where in the country you were. Even within a locality though, there were different times. So when the railroad was introduced, the question became "whose time should we choose?" Would it be the bank's time or the grocer's whose clock ran 10mins ahead of the banker, or the bar, whose clock was 10mins slower than the bank. So, for the sake of it's own business, the Railways introduced their own clocks and prominently displayed them at each railway station. As it turned out, the businesses soon found it necessary to synch up with the railway clocks - the banks because they got cash by train, the markets because the trains delivered their groceries, and the hotels and bars because their customers arrived by train. But all was not well immediately and there was significant opposition to giving up the local time in areas where, say, noon was not at 12 o'clock according to the new "railway time". There were protests and splits in the same town. One fraction would be going by the railway time, the other by the older local time. Of course, we all know who eventually won this battle. It is interesting that we often ardently fight for the most dear causes, yet, as time goes by and technology shapes our future in ways previously unimaginable, these causes seem almost silly. There are some things I feel strongly about but where should I fight to maintain the statusquoe and where should I let events take their own course?
The other story is about the advent of the first high-speed photography. It actually came out of a simple bet (historians dispute whether money was actually involved but the story is true). Leland Stanford Jr. (of Stanford University) had made his money in transportation with the advent of railroads. An argument once came up, whether or not a galloping horses' all four feet are ever in air simultaneously. How to resolve the issue? The horse moved too fast for human eyes to discern the motion. So Stanford hired a photographer, Moire, to get some answers. At that time, shutter speed of cameras was far too slow to capture this motion needing 1-2 sec to keep the shutter open. Moire required 5 hundredths of a second shutter speed to image a galloping horse. He eventually succeeded in building such a camera. He then placed a trip wire on a race track that was connected to a camera shutter. So as the horse came galloping by, sure enough it tripped the wire and in that instant the camera imaged it. Moire went a step further and set up 24 trip wires in close proximity, each controlling to the shutter of a different camera. Eventually Moire got slices of time captured in a sequence and resolved the issue once and for all - yes, a galloping horse's four feet are in air at the same time [the original frames].
Human tempo: We know from the theory of relativity that time is not a constant in the universe. It is a function of your frame of reference, so, an observer and a speeding astronaut have two very different idea of the passage of time. On earth, in our existence far from the speed of light, we also have different perceptions of time, and that is manifested as tempo of the human body. Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist, once had a patient who was astounding in his understanding of time. His body tempo was so slow that he almost appeared frozen in time. A simple act of wiping nose takes one about 2 seconds. For this patient it took 2 hours. Dr. Sacks set up a still picture camera to take pictures every few minutes of the patient in the act of wiping his nose. In all the camera took 24 pictures and then the good doctor put them in a binder so they can be flipped demonstrating one action. The patient explained that he found no odd behavior in the passage of time but when he was shown the picture book, the patient was thunderstruck. How could that be?
The flip side of this story is a fast tempo and a female patient of Dr. Sacks had just this problem. While the best Olympic athletes have a reaction time of tenth of a second, hers was 0.07secs. Dr. Sacks set her down in front of some of her students seated in a semicircular formation and asked them to play catch. The students were to throw a ball at her and she was to catch the ball and throw it back. She would catch each ball and throw it back so rapidly, the poor students, still with their throwing arm in the air, would be severely hit with the returning ball.
posted by yash | 5:51 PM
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