Dr. Ronald L. Mallett was only the 79th African-American to earn a doctorate in physics. But being black wasn’t the only potentially complicating factor he faced on the road to becoming a tenured theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut.

Another was his reason for choosing his vocation, one he kept hidden for years. (…) Ronald Mallett wanted to build a time machine.

Traveling into the future is easy. (…) All you have to do is build a spaceship that moves nearly as fast as the speed of light, pump it with enough fuel for a long round-trip voyage, and head for the stars. By the time you return to Earth in, say, five years, you’ll have aged half a decade while everyone and everything else on Earth has aged considerably more.

But who wants to go to the future? (Nowadays, it’s terrifying even to ponder what the headlines will be tomorrow.)

Certainly not Mallett. For more than 50 years, he’s been obsessed with finding a way to return to the past. Specifically, to the Bronx, in 1955. That’s the year his father, Boyd Mallet, died. Mallett’s lifelong mission? To traverse spatiotemporal continuum and warn his dad to take better care of himself. To tell him to kick the two-pack-a-day habit that helped lead to the fatal heart attack he suffered at the age of 33.

The “overwhelming shock” of his father’s death caused Mallett, now 63, to “just disconnect from reality,” he says. So when, at age 10, he started building a jury-rigged jalopy, based on the gyroscopic contraption on the cover of the Classics Illustrated version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, it might have seemed as if he had gone over the edge.

But the next decades only saw Mallett’s focus on his mission intensify with laser-like precision. He devoured every book on Einstein he could find. He boned up on differential equations and tensor calculus. And by 1973, at Penn State, he’d earned his Ph.D. Moved by the intensely personal nature of his quest, Spike Lee announced this past summer that he’s currently writing a screenplay for a movie — which he’ll direct — based on Mallett’s book, Time Traveler (Thunder’s Mouth, 2006).

{ The Boston Phoenix | Continue reading }

Related:

Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) is a musical piece composed by John Cage and is the subject of the slowest and longest-lasting musical performance yet undertaken.

It was originally written in 1987 for organ. A typical performance of the piece lasts for about 20 to 70 minutes. In 1985, Cage opted to omit the detail of “exactly how slow the piece should be played”.

The current organ performance of the piece at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640. (…)

The piece started with a rest of seventeen months, beginning September 5, 2001, which was the 85th anniversary of Cage’s birth. The first audible sound appeared on February 5, 2003. Further dates for changing notes are:

▪ July 5, 2004
▪ July 5, 2005
▪ January 5, 2006
▪ May 5, 2006
▪ July 5, 2008
▪ November 5, 2008
▪ February 5, 2009
▪ July 5, 2010
▪ February 5, 2011
▪ August 5, 2011
▪ July 5, 2012
▪ October 5, 2013
▪ September 5, 2020

On these dates St. Burchardi usually is well visited. The sound change of January 5, 2006 is available as an Audiofile.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Britain’s oldest virgin who celebrates her 105th birthday this weekend says no sex is the secret to her long life. | Related: No takers for contest that requires abstinence. }

Most clocks just tell time, simply and reliably. Not the $1.8 million “time eater” unveiled at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.

The masterpiece has no hands or digital numbers and it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time.

Inventor John Taylor used his own money to build the clock.

{ AP/CNEWS | Continue reading }

photo {William Eggleston }

{ Before and after images of various San Francisco locations used in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) | Vertigo, then and now }

The time women spend putting on make up and getting dressed works out at 3,276 hours (136 days) over their lifetimes while men only devote 1,092 hours to looking their best.

A survey of 1,000 women also showed that 67 per cent thought that the time spent getting ready was actually a chore.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

Infinity (symbolically represented with ∞) comes from the Latin infinitas or “unboundedness.” It refers to several distinct concepts (usually linked to the idea of “without end”) which arise in philosophy, mathematics, and theology.

The precise origin of the infinity symbol ∞ is unclear. One possibility is suggested by the name it is sometimes called—the lemniscate, from the Latin lemniscus, meaning “ribbon.”

A popular explanation is that the infinity symbol is derived from the shape of a Möbius strip. Again, one can imagine walking along its surface forever. However, this explanation is not plausible, since the symbol had been in use to represent infinity for over two hundred years before August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing discovered the Möbius strip in 1858.

It is also possible that it is inspired by older religious/alchemical symbolism. For instance, it has been found in Tibetan rock carvings, and the ouroboros, or infinity snake, is often depicted in this shape.

John Wallis is usually credited with introducing ∞ as a symbol for infinity in 1655 in his De sectionibus conicis. One conjecture about why he chose this symbol is that he derived it from a Roman numeral for 1000 that was in turn derived from the Etruscan numeral for 1000, which looked somewhat like CIƆ and was sometimes used to mean “many.” Another conjecture is that he derived it from the Greek letter ω (omega), the last letter in the Greek alphabet.

Another possibility is that the symbol was chosen because it was easy to rotate an “8″ character by 90° when typesetting was done by hand. The symbol is sometimes called a “lazy eight”, evoking the image of an “8″ lying on its side.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Today we enter one of the most auspicious days ever for the Chinese culture: 8-8-8.

But why is eight so lucky?

”In Cantonese [the language of Southern China and Hong Kong], the word for ‘fah’ means ‘eight,’ but also sounds like the word for ‘make a lot of fortune,’ ” explains Z.J. Tong, owner of the Chicago Chinese Cultural Institute and Bookstore.
Thus in a homonym-crazy society like China’s: Eight equals lucky.

{ Chicago Tribune | Continue reading }

Imagine a form of life so unusual that we cannot figure out how it dies. That’s exactly what researchers are finding beneath the floor of the sea off Peru. The microbes being studied there — single-celled organisms called Archaea — live in time frames that can perhaps best be described as geological. Consider: A bacterium like Escherichia Coli divides and reproduces every twenty minutes or so. But the microbes in the so-called Peruvian Margin take hundreds or thousands of years to divide.

{ Centauri Dreams | Continue reading }

Keeping track of time is essential for perceiving what’s happening around us and responding to it. In order to tell where a voice is coming from, we time how long it takes for the sound to reach both ears. And when we respond to the voice by speaking ourselves, we need precise timing to make ourselves understood. Our muscles in the mouth, tongue, and throat must all twitch in carefully timed choreography. (…)

For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.

One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you’re wheeling around a dance floor in love. Psychologists argued that these experiences tweaked the pulse generator, speeding up the flow of pulses or slowing it down.

But the fact is that the biology of the brain just doesn’t work like the clocks we’re familiar with. Neurons can do a good job of producing a steady series of pulses. They don’t have what it takes to count pulses accurately for seconds or minutes or more. The mistakes we make in telling time also raise doubts about the clock models.

{ Discover magazine | Continue reading }

New research from Wharton and the Carlson School shows that a methodologically-appealing measure of impulsivity - hyperbolic discounting rate - may actually reflect a systematic “skew” in the way people perceive time.

{ Developing Intelligence/ScienceBlogs | via Blog around the clock/ScienceBlogs }

photo { Rankin }

One of the things that’s always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get–not just in the span of decades, but also in the span of minutes. Put someone in a room without a clock or watch and ask them to guess when an hour has passed, and on average, the older person will perceive the hour zipping by faster than the younger person.

The older I get, the more I think that one of the keys to happiness–or at least one of the signs of happiness–is getting to some kind of place where time seems to be passing at the right speed.

{ Steven Berlin Johnson | Continue reading }

{ Troika, All the time in the world, 2008 | Electroluminescent wall, Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5 }

related { Hints of ‘time before Big Bang’ }

“In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time… It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both.” Zeilinger smiled as he finished: “I throw this out as a challenge to our philosophy friends.”

{ A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: Do we create the world just by looking at it? | Seed }