Radiolab Podcast

The radio lab piece was definitely an interesting listen. Beethoven’s ninth symphony stretched was almost eerie. Time is plastic, as Jad said, and the history behind the time we follow now is a lot more vast than I would expect. I appreciated the commentary on photography with Edward Muybridge, who began his experiments with capturing movement after a “bet” (not really a bet!) on horses. He used the camera to unlock the secrets behind a still moment. Something that lasts a second is stretched out for an eternity, showing what might have gone unnoticed. That’s the really beautiful thing about photography; the preservation and discoveries to be made in that. They went on to talk about how time today IS clocks, to us, but it has a rich history in nature. The call of a certain bird or the scent of the seasonal fruits and flowers indicates passing time, just as much as the clock does. Really, time is change. Any change in movement, in smell, in surroundings: it all indicates that something has been altered, and thus the internal clock keeps ticking. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a whole other thing. When you move faster, your clock moves slower, and vice versa… my takeaway from it is that there really isn’t one ‘true’ value of time. I’ll end this blog post with a quote towards the end, from Jay Griffeth, that I love.

“I think that's something that in prayer, in meditation, in art, and in love, actually, is that people lose that very fretful ticking off kind of sense of clock time[…] all that you have to have done is loved somebody, to know that, and to hold them for half an hour and you can know that that half an hour has lasted an eternity.”