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