Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 2B
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Hello readers. I hope that you are well, 

that your hands are washed and that your 

thoughts remain calm. I’ve had this B-Side 

in my calendar for over a month. I am so 

excited that it’s finally here. I remember 

the day I put it in my calendar. I wrote 

down when the articles would be due, 

when they would go to production here 

in the newsroom and the date they’d be 

published. Like most things in my calendar, 

I wrote them with certainty. I envisioned 

the future through the truth of the present. 

Most of us do this, and we 

usually don’t notice it. We 

think about time through 

a unidirectional arrow of 

past, present and future that 

continues at a steady rate of 

60 seconds per minute. But 

time is fickle: Living through 

the 
COVID-19 
pandemic 

teaches us this. Time can 

speed and slow. One minute 

can be vastly more important 

than the next, or they could all be rendered 

useless in the following hour. 

As I float in the current of the 

coronavirus’s impact on our 

world, it seems time has 

completely stopped. Yet, in 

the same moment, it also 

seems like time is moving 

faster than ever. I didn’t 

consider any of this when I 

chose “time” as the theme of 

my B-side. I thought about 

clocks, 
and 
rhythm 
and 

even considered the power 

of suspense. But I did not 

consider the very essence of time — its 

unpredictability and vagueness. 

The past can change the future and the 

future will alter the past. The present is a 

mixture of them both. It is a non-static idea 

that changes person-to-person, minute-

to-minute, day-to-day. Time is universal. 

It does not speak a language or hold a 

nationality. Seemingly, then, we all agree 

to understand the un-understandable. 

Laid out in this week’s B-Side are some 

of our writer’s perspectives on time as it 

pertains to art. I encourage you to read 

them all, and then, consider: What is your 

time, what is your art and where will they 

take you next? 

—Zoe Phillips, Senior Arts Editor

The ‘Time’ B-Side: An Introduction

ZOE PHILLIPS

Daily Community Culture Editor

PIXABAY

Two hands on a clock. A date in a history book. 

Tiny grains of sand cascading through the waist of 

an hourglass. Time tends to be malleable. Hours 

melt across disciplines, years stretch between facts 

and minutes explode underneath microscopes. Each 

creates a spectrum of worlds within which research 

can happen, helping minds grow. In Ann Arbor, these 

worlds coexist quietly among offices and classrooms 

across the University. I am highlighting a few of them 

today. 

Special thanks to Jatin Dua, Fred Adams, Cindy 

Lustig, Amy Chavasse and Grant Weldon for their 

help with this piece. I sincerely appreciate your 

enthusiasm and flexibility during the transition to 

online classes and other COVID-19 preventative 

measures.

…

LSA professor Jatin Dua doesn’t think of 

time as linear. The past is not directly correlated 

to the present, and the future is a project to 

be actively imagined right now. Dua studies 

anthropology, a discipline he says is interwoven 

with multidimensional uses of time. A century ago, 

the specialty worked to create a “rupture in time,” 

drawing a line between people of the present and 

people of the past as a way to distinguish us from 

them. 

“It’s tied to creating hierarchy,” Dua said, 

“where some people live in the present and others 

— primarily those who are seen as non-Western — 

lived in different times.” The effects of that mindset 

linger today, he added. Discussions surrounding 

development, 
for 
example, 
can 
“presume 

disjunctures in time” by making assumptions about 

the prioritization of modernity. 

More recently, though, anthropology works to 

define how history comes to matter. What do we 

decide gets attention, and when? “This thing that 

we call tradition or culture,” Dua noted, “is always 

shifting.” In this sense, anthropologists work with 

history as a dynamic tool — it’s the context that 

shapes our present, rather than a story that remains 

untouched. 

This mindset changes Dua’s perspective on time 

as a whole, too: “Thinking anthropologically about 

time makes you constantly think about what kinds 

of forgetting is (sic) required to imagine that we are 

different from the past,” he said. It’s easy to create 

notions of progress that can shape the politics of a 

future, “but that’s actually premised on forgetting 

lots of things,” Dua said. 

“What happens when we don’t think of time as 

linear?” he asked. “What are all the things that we 

choose to forget in order to imagine that timelines 

are linear?” 

Dua asks these questions in his own research 

— he studies piracy and trade off the coast of 

Somalia in a community that continues to rely 

on the timeline of monsoon season, even today. 

Their cyclical world shapes trading networks that 

wouldn’t develop elsewhere, yet complications over 

a linear future still linger in Dua’s studies. 

“This idea that in the future ships will be, or 

can be, automated leads to people thinking about 

questions around labor regulations on ships very 

differently,” Dua said. “But then along with this, 

there’s this idea that in the future climate change 

will make oceanic storms and other things 

completely 
unpredictable, 
therefore 
making 

automation not possible. So there are two kinds of 

visions of the future.” 

Both are simultaneously possible and impossible; 

the question becomes what kind of future is being 

imagined, and for whom? 

This leaves Dua and his peers in anthropology 

thinking of the future as a project instead of a 

destination. His mission lies in complicating the 

relationship between the past and the present, 

asking who we place in the past and why. From 

there, Dua wonders how a person’s imagined future 

shapes his or her present and past, creating a braid 

of overlapping definitions, realities and possibilities 

for time at large. 

…

Physics has its own kind of imagination, too. 

Like Dua, LSA professor Fred Adams operates 

under multiple definitions of time, though Adams’s 

tend to be much, much bigger — in fact, they’re of 

galactic scale. 

In an email interview with The Daily, Adams 

wrote that, when studying the stars and planets, 

“there are no temporal surprises.” 60 seconds in 

a minute. 1000 milliseconds in a second. Things 

progress at normal, calculable rates. Time thus 

becomes the backdrop of research — an unchanging 

provider of normalcy. 

In cosmology, the study of the whole universe, 

“time is more interesting,” Adams wrote. “The 

universe is observed to be expanding, and we 

can not only understand its temporal behavior 

in terms of general relativity but we can also 

measure time by the current size of the universe,” 

Adams added. This schism between the current, 

calculable present and the blurred lines of warped 

spacetime in general relativity adds to Adams’s 

list of approaches. He also mentioned quantum 

mechanics, a field that requires a “probabilistic 

description of what happens, or when it happens, so 

that our concept of time changes accordingly.” 

Like in anthropology, Adams’s research relies on 

a proper application of all these definitions. Physics 

and astrophysics require the use of time on a scale 

very different from our everyday understanding. 

To Adams, time shrinks and grows across a radical 

spectrum of consideration. 

Within the Big Bang theory, for example, 

“we must consider time scales as short as 10 -43 

seconds.” That’s one second divided by a number 

with 43 zeros. It’s the smallest piece of time possible 

— a number so miniscule our human brains can 

barely fathom its existence. 

On the other side of things, time grows to 

millions and billions of years when considering the 

average life of an everyday star.

“Physics and astrophysics will continue to 

unfold over time scales that greatly exceed the 

current cosmic age,” Adams wrote, “and we can 

consider astrophysical processes for times as long 

as 10100 years.” That’s a number followed by 100 

zeros; a googol of years. 

Beyond that, though, Adams added that people 

often think of “letting time ‘go to infinity.’” When 

we try to imagine scales of such length, we might 

picture Buzz Lightyear’s animatronic arm lifting 

to the sky as he proclaims “to infinity and beyond!” 

But compared to forever,even a number followed 

by 100 zeros is quite close to zero.

Adams routinely navigates between these 

extremes — his research stretches across a normally 

unfathomable range of seconds, minutes, hours 

and years, a fact he acknowledged leads him to “a 

broader understanding of time.” More specifically, 

this understanding comes from his study of 

variances in actual real time; in other words, while 

Dua might consider the cultural perception of time 

by people between past and present, Adams focuses 

on measurable changes that we can see on the clock. 

This difference “should be taken with a grain (or 

an ocean) of salt,” Adams wrote. Indeed, he is right: 

From the widest of angles, both professors ground 

themselves in the same understanding that time is 

a pliant, ductile tool for research. It morphs based 

on the question and context at hand, yet remains 

the steady backdrop for reflecting, analyzing and 

furthering our understanding of the world before 

us. It’s a mysteriously flexible reality under which 

we can all live, think and grow. 

…

LSA professor Cindy Lustig also studies that 

reality. As a psychologist, she works to explain those 

processes of living, thinking and growing from 

within our own brains. As such, Lustig approaches 

time through both a general environment and a 

point of focus. “We exist in time and it is constantly 

affecting us,” she explained in an email interview 

with The Daily. As we build our existences across 

seconds, hours, days and years, the passage of those 

units also changes our very existence. It’s “mind-

bending,” Lustig wrote. 

As we age, our brains gain the attention 

that’s necessary to acknowledge that influence. 

Especially within milliseconds to seconds, “we 

get better able to focus on time as we move from 

childhood to young adulthood,” Lustig wrote. As 

we gain that understanding, time accrues into 

minutes, then hours, days and years. With age, “the 

same ‘chunk’ of time in absolute terms begins to 

seem smaller and smaller,” Lustig wrote, though 

she added that she’s unsure if that difference has 

to do with real brain changes or a simple shift in 

the amount of time we’ve accumulated to compare 

things to. Either way, the fluid nature of our various 

perceptions serve to reflect the malleability of time 

inside and outside our brains. 

Lustig’s research confirms this fluidity, pushing 

us to question our notions of who’s best at tracking 

time. She studies attention in older adults, which is 

often assumed to be worse than those of younger 

adults. In her experiments, she asks participants 

to focus on time differences displayed across a 

grid that occur over the course of milliseconds. 

“Maintaining that type of attention over several 

minutes is very hard,” Lustig wrote, but “older 

adults are if anything more motivated and focused 

on the task.” When faced with distractions like 

a video playing nearby, though, that same older 

demographic is hurt the most. “So you might say 

their ability to stay focused on time is both intense 

and fragile,” Lustig wrote. It’s an all-or-nothing 

game of focus, permeated by caveats and subtleties 

that deepen Lustig’s interpretation of time overall. 

This complexity of understanding weaves its 

way into our creation of memories, too. “When 

people look back on their lives,” Lustig wrote, “they 

tend to remember the most events from about ages 

18-30.” This might seem connected to preconceived 

notions about the health of a younger mind, but 

Lustig added that this so-called “memory bump” 

is only true for positive memories. When it comes 

to remembering the negative, we have no age 

filter. “It turns out this is at least in part because 

we have cultural scripts for when positive events 

are supposed to happen,” Lustig wrote. We expect 

to build friendships, enter marriages, find careers 

and have children during those years, and our 

brains are affected by such expectations. “No one 

has a designated time when they ‘expect’ to get in 

a car accident,” Lustig wrote. As such, it impacts 

our memory banks outside of the “memory bump,” 

complicating our internal timelines and furthering 

the ocean of interpretations upon which we surf. 

In that case, our memories, and with them our 

ongoing understanding of time, remain influenced 

by minutes and hours as much as they are by our 

mind’s expectations of what we are to do with them. 

A few minutes for musing: Looking at time across topics

ZOE PHILLIPS

Daily Community Culture Editor

B-SIDE: INTRO

I envisioned the 
future through 
the truth of the 

present

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

