On Time: Finding Your Pace in a World Addicted to Fast

Part Two

What is Time and Where Does it Go? (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

Includes: why time was a god, then a gift, then a bully; how your view of time shapes your life; what is the point of a femtosecond; the joy of cattle time; what happens when you lose time sense; why seconds slow down in sinking ships; how to think faster – although time-poor thinking makes us stupid; why distractions are addictive; why Roman philosophers hated hanging around; and what Hilary Mantel and Hamlet gained from procrastination.

2

How Time Gives Us the World (#u1ad2347a-dfed-5dfa-ab66-b68d6c261695)

Why we invented it, how it reinvents us

Sometimes I wish that nobody had invented clocks. Then my days would not be chopped into miserly minutes. I would have all the time in the world.

It is a sweet fantasy. But I need not hunt far to find it. This is the land of time that our toddler inhabits, and what a merry place it looks. How he howls if we urge him to hurry while he is studying a marathon of ants on a pavement, or try to scoop him up before he has patted the last jag of jigsaw into place. Often we ignore him; we have to bowl him off to nursery on time, into his bath on time. But how he blossoms on weekends when the day ebbs and flows with the hunger, curiosity and vitality that set the beat of his clock.

‘Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being,’ advised psychologist James Hillman. ‘It’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit it’s right here.’ If this is bliss, my son has it. Ask when something happened and he answers, ‘Yesterday.’ Ask when something is going to happen and he smiles, ‘Today?’ then gets back to what he was doing. The only clocks he respects are dandelions, because his present consists of whatever present thing grips him.

Children remind us that obeying time does not come naturally. When my son rears in protest as we try to saddle him with our schedule, I worry that he is learning to see time as his enemy. Because clocks are not going anywhere, and thank goodness for that. This chapter explores why we invented time and how it reinvents us. To a surprising degree our life is shaped by something often hidden from us: the version of time that we carry around inside our head. There are persuasive arguments for seeing time as your friend.

1. How time changed the world

Time is confusing. It is invisible, unbiddable; we cannot touch, taste, see or smell it, although you would have to travel a long way – as far as the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest – to find anyone above the age of ten with their wits intact who might deny that it exists.

The Pirahã are not just foxed by time. They also have no concept of numbers. Show them five soya beans and two soya beans and they cannot count the difference. Time blindness is an extension of their number blindness. This is because what we are talking about, when we talk about time, is something by which to count life. Its many puzzles have bewitched astrophysicists and befuddled philosophers, but set aside the black holes and the sophistry and you could do worse than this explanation given in 1762 by Henry Home, an industrious farmer-judge, who served as mentor to Adam Smith and David Hume and as the midwife to Scotland’s Enlightenment: ‘A child perceives an interval, and that interval it learns to call time.’

The complication is that from a user’s point of view, time is actually two separate things: it is the dimension in which we exist, and an organizational device like a compass. The compass’s job is to help us to navigate the dimension: to orientate ourselves in space, to measure the duration of events, to co-ordinate actions, and to plot our next steps. Day to day, however, we tend to think of time as something else entirely: a resource, divided into days, hours, minutes, seconds – the stuff that we never have enough of.

If you can bring yourself to forget its dismaying habit of marching on, then time grows easier to admire. This utterly ingenious intellectual technology lets us impose order on the rolling hurry of succession that is existence, by subdividing experience into three categories – past, present and future. It is also elastic, spanning infinitesimally tiny intervals such as attoseconds (a quintillionth or billionth of a billionth of a second) and epic photonic journeys across space called light years (5,878,625,373,184 miles). Its applications are numberless.

Try to imagine life without atomic clocks.

take a ten-second pause: really picture that thought

Did you envisage a world without smartphones, satellites or the internet? Almost certainly there were no nuclear submarines. It would be a slower place by far.

This little thought experiment illustrates an odd thing that happens when we find new ways to measure time: we transform what we can do with it. It is what cosmologist Gerald Whitrow was getting at when he spoke of ‘the invention of time’. Clocks were not simple witnesses to humanity’s story but accelerants. Each technological leap in timekeeping sprang a change.

The earliest evidence that humanity looked to the sky in search of answers about time is a painting on the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, dating to 15,000 BC. Twenty-nine black dots undulate like hoofprints beneath a stippled brown horse; they are thought to represent the cycle of the moon, making this the oldest surviving calendar. Venerable obelisks still serve as shadow clocks in Egypt, a function some have performed since 3500 BC, but the circle of megaliths at Stonehenge is Britain’s oldest clock. Built around 3100 BC, its design ensured that their arches would frame sunset on 21 December, the northern winter solstice, and sunrise on 21 June, the high point of the northern summer. And those ancient worshippers had reason to celebrate it. Once our hunter-gatherer ancestors understood the meanderings of the moon, the sun and the seasons, they were armed with the co-ordinates that would enable them to stop living from hand to mouth and begin farming the land. As agriculture developed, communities grew until eventually there was not only enough surplus food but also enough time to spare people to foster new skills and interests. Society developed.

Seasonal rhythms were central to life, as is reflected in the ceremonies of organized religion. Look past the burnt offerings and the vestments and you will find that the pulse behind the stories and traditions is agriculture’s calendar and the urge to control time, with festivals contrived to coax heaven into supplying timely sun and rain. Émile Durkheim, the forefather of sociology, identified this coercive property: ‘A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularities.’ If festivals paced time’s passage, with every culture offering sacrifices to encourage the New Year to be a kind one, the day’s staging posts were events: meal times, work times, sleep times, sun up, sun down, lengthening shadows and bells, just as the muezzin’s call to prayer sets the beat of a traditional Islamic day. Briefer intervals could be measured – a trained stargazer in ancient Babylon could tell time to within a quarter of an hour – but clocks were unnecessary. At such a gentle pace, who needs minutes?

Horology, the art and science of measuring time, soon fascinated rulers, because whoever controlled time could control people. Dates and hours supplied tools for synchronizing actions, whether to wage wars or to co-ordinate workers. It is no accident that the greater the number of clocks in an environment, the swifter people will go, as sociologist Robert Levine discovered when investigating the pace of life around the world. No wonder every major civilization invested heavily in the study of time, often hoping to prise open a window onto the future. Chinese and Babylonian astronomers (who were also priests) used their observations to predict not only astral phenomena but events on earth – a covert means of telling kings what to do.

A stroll through the history of clocks is like turning the pages of a flicker book of civilization’s greatest hits. Each occasion the timekeeper is reborn it is in a form that both mirrors and distorts its age. Shadow, sand, water, incense and candle clocks came early, but to trade event time for bossy, precise, hour-and-minute time, mechanical means were necessary.

The first automated timepieces appeared in European monasteries in the thirteenth century; named after the Latin clocca, ‘bell’, these faceless, armless clocks struck the hour as religious houses always had. Otherwise they were the preserve of the wealthy. To encounter a clock was to learn that here lived somebody to be reckoned with, as did Elizabeth I’s visitors at Whitehall Palace, where they were greeted by a needlework map of Britain, a sundial shaped like a monkey and a wind-up clock of an ‘Ethiop riding upon a rhinocerous’.

Clocks also supplied passports to power. In 1601, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented the Wanli emperor with a chiming clock, hoping to gain admission to China’s capital city. This device, so pettable compared to the huge water-clock towers that then thumbed the kingdom, inspired what would become an imperial passion for collecting clocks.

As navigation dissolved the oceans’ frontiers, a series of shipwrecks led Britain’s government to offer a prize to whoever found a means of tracking longitude. John Harrison, a carpenter from Yorkshire, devoted forty-three years to create a timepiece with sea legs steady enough to keep time, week after week, in heat, cold and tropical humidity on an ever-bobbing ship – saving lives, accelerating commerce, defeating the limits of space. Next, industrialization brought factory clocks and managers brandishing pocket watches, leading to the birth of a science called efficiency.

After engineers parcelled up the land in railways, the need to co-ordinate timetables led London Time to be decreed the whole country’s in 1880 – the first national standard time in the world. Towns no longer had their own time, and the loss of these gentler rhythms was mourned by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles: ‘Tess … started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.’

Once wristwatches became wardrobe staples, people were cuffed to time’s rule – an intrusion that was not always welcomed. In the 1950s Anirini, a Greek island, was so dull that clocks proved unnecessary, reported one traveller, describing how the suspected homicide of a husband, sent plunging down a well, was forgivingly ascribed to tedium. Locals bridled at neither the murderess nor the investigating police; however, the fat Yugoslav timepiece on an itinerant fisherman’s wrist horrified them.

As time technology grew nimbler, so did temporal thinking. It could be on a galactic scale; Albert Einstein theorized that billion-year-old collisions between black holes would be detected in waves of energy that continue to ripple across the universe, a prediction finally confirmed in 2016. Einstein also claimed correctly that time slows if you move fast enough (accelerating clocks grow heavier). Put an atomic clock, which keeps time by means of caesium electrons, losing one second in thirty million years, on a GPS satellite, which orbits earth at 18,000 mph, and sure enough, it loses 38 microseconds a day, requiring special electronics to recalculate its positioning. Thanks to such awesome precision, we can build targeted missiles and little gadgets capable of traversing chasms of space, landing on speeding comets and burying their noses in faraway planets’ secrets.

Computers and digital faces replaced the soothing flow of revolving arms with numbers, giving time a staccato beat – an apt prelude to the disruptions ahead, when smartphones would become our favourite means of telling time. Yet to some amazement, the watch is not dead. Luxury sales soar. The Rolex, Hublot or diving watch, equally true on the seabed or atop Everest, sits like a jewel on its owner’s wrist – perhaps, if he is a man, his only jewel. It is there less to indicate that its wearer is manacled to a schedule (even if this is how he is able to afford it) than to imply enduring success – the same message issued by Elizabeth I’s rhinoceros clock in Whitehall. Canny manufacturers market these beauties as heirlooms-in-waiting: a signal of your grip on time. This is in marked contrast to today’s other horological success story, Apple’s smartwatch, which does not passively purvey temporal information. No, it is a nagging device, buzzing like a wasp to alert its owner to an appointment or to that dire emergency, the arrival of another email – rupturing the user’s attention while ostensibly micromanaging her time.

We have travelled far from event time, which patterned our forefathers’ days according to the occasions that mattered, to a strange new, non-event time, which continually interrupts our flow. The smartwatch reminds me of that disquieting truth: whoever controls time also controls people.

Does this version of time work for you? Or does it make you its slave?

2. Our fictional units of time

In 1914, as the world geared up for the Great War, an inquisitive seven-year-old began dissecting her new favourite toy, an alarm clock. She wanted to see this peculiar thing, time. Seven alarm clocks died grisly deaths before her mother cottoned on to what was happening and gave her one device on which to experiment.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper never found what she was looking for. Instead she became a mathematician, joining the US Navy in the next world war to help devise a computer. When hostilities ended in 1945, the Navy said that at thirty-eight she was too old to join the regular force, so off she went to devise the first programming language using solely English words, flooring sceptics who imagined computers could only do arithmetic. The Navy soon took her back.

Rear Admiral Hopper was reluctantly demobbed at seventy-nine, two decades after the regular date. By then she was known as Amazing Grace, having popularized the term ‘debugging’ after fishing a dead moth from a computer’s innards. But she is best remembered for her post-retirement lectures. One day, fed up with being asked why satellite signals were so slow, she chopped a telephone cable into 11.8-inch lengths. This, she explained, doling them out to her audience, is the distance light travels in a nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Yes, even lightning speed takes time.

Hopper stretched the limits of her era, ignoring rules and feminine expectations in order to prolong her career, as well as to turn computers into fatally word-friendly devices. Yet even one as resourceful as she could not locate time either within or outside an alarm clock, for the reason that time does not exist. Our units for measuring it – millennia, centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes – are also fictional. A nanosecond seems solid enough when you flop it about in a length of copper cable, but is no less arbitrary a way to measure our progress through the fourth dimension of existence than the gold stars on the badge of a McDonald’s trainee, marking his rise from novice to expert burger flipper. The crucial feature of seconds and years is their regular arrival (unlike McDonald’s stars).

All units of measurement are belief systems created to organize facts. Universality bestows a veneer of objectivity, yet these units are no less subjective than the yard, which was introduced by Henry I, ruthless fourth son of William the Conqueror, who outmanoeuvred his brothers, standardized measures and restored England’s coinage. His yardstick? The distance from his thumb to his nose. Similarly, calendars are the legacies of quarrels between astronomers, theologians and monarchs. Although most of us follow the solar year (identified by sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus as approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds), the Christian, Islamic and Chinese religious festivals stick with lunar months, just like our oldest calendar in the Lascaux cave.

In AD 398 St Augustine of Hippo queried the validity of such celestial yardsticks:

I heard from a learned man that the motions of the sun, moon, and stars constituted time, and I assented not. Why should not rather the motions of all bodies be time? What if the lights of heaven should cease, and a potter’s wheel run round, would there be no time by which we might measure those revolutions?

And it turns out that not even the sky is reliable. As life accelerates, the planet’s solar orbit is slowing by fractions of a second each year. Blame gales in our mountains, which cause the earth to jiggle on its axis, and the friction of tides, which drag the earth’s rotation by 2.3 metres per second, per day, every hundred years (an effect partially masked by a glacial rebound, since the last Ice Age, of land once trapped beneath continental ice sheets, which speeds earth’s rotation by 0.6 metres per second per day). This slowdown maddens the engineers who nurse the atomic clocks on which our communications and defence systems depend. After all, if these fall out of synch with the planet, a missile or satellite will veer off course.

One nanosecond. One foot. If a misdirected drone were whizzing at you, you would care a lot about missing nanoseconds. But in general, such measures mean little to you and me, since our senses cannot compute such minuscule intervals. Time only gains purpose as a tool that we can use.

What is the point of femtoseconds (a quadrillionth, or millionth of a billionth, of a second)? It sounds a nonsense word, perhaps a satirical comment upon the emasculation of time, slivered into such absurdities. But although Concorde could not have travelled an atom’s breadth in such a minute interval, scientists, aided by femtoseconds, can track, instant by instant, what transpires at the atomic level during phase transition, that mystifying moment when a liquid becomes solid and free-range particles suddenly lock into a lattice, like dancers at a military dance. Our tiniest temporal unit yet is Planck time (the time it takes light to travel 4 × 10-35 metres) – mind-boggling, yet necessary, since it permits quantum physicists to comprehend the force that keeps life turning: gravity.

3. The comforts of time – or, why we love linear

You too are a clock. The beat of your life is the tempo of events – occasions whose rhythm dictates how relaxed or stressed you feel. A life borne on a steady routine can be titanically productive, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant demonstrated, his schedule so unwavering that amused citizens of Königsberg are said to have set their clocks by his afternoon stroll.

We invented time from a need for predictability. In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant observed that time is ‘at the foundation of all our intuitions’. Without it, how could we make sense of the world, distil lessons from experience, decide what to do when, or guess how long it will take? Time’s numbers and dates impose a reassuring form on vast existential uncertainties such as duration, decay and amorphous feelings like our sense of inevitability, empowering us to co-operate and compete as no other animal can.

Anything that gives time definition and direction is a blessing if you are an upright ape whose life’s work is, essentially, to survive an unpredictable environment and convince yourself that fleeting existence has a purpose. Recalling yesterday, dreaming about tomorrow: these mental co-ordinates extend a miraculous thread on which to peg our lives, allowing us to weave irretrievable sensory data into something more substantial: a tale of who we are and where we are going. Time’s script gives us history, identity, accumulating meanings, reasons to stay alive.

If time is foundational to our being, physicality defines how we conceive it. Concepts of time and space are interchangeable in indigenous languages, such as the Karen’s of Thailand. Soon is ‘d’yi ba’ – ‘not far away’. Sunset might be ‘three kilometres away’ (if that is how far you could walk in the time it would take for it to arrive). Similarly, we think of time as an independent, often impatient being – time ‘races ahead’ or we are ‘behind’ it. These metaphors are pale shadows of beliefs in time as independent divinities, like Kairos or Chronos. But the main reason that we see time as a moving spirit and life as a journey is that we are upright apes, striding on two legs, facing ahead. If a spider, jellyfish or side-shifting crab spoke of time, doubtless its vocabulary would be different.

No doubt it is also because we are upright apes, who like to move on, race, climb, get ahead, that many of us feel contented only if we are metaphorically getting on – in a career or romance, or ascending a social ladder. Our craving for a sense of destination in life’s journey (once we called it heaven) is preferable to the depressing alternative: to see life in purely physical terms, as a wizened decline unto the zero of death. How much better to mark life’s milestones with accumulating numbers, from your first birthday to your hundredth, evoking achievement, progress: a story from a lifetime.

Today, though, linear time has a challenger: our superfast, flexible hyperdigital telepresent. As a result, holding onto a sense of life as progressive – or simply getting through our plans from start to end – can be a trial. Operate on too many channels simultaneously and attention frays. This is dislocating. Time can resemble less a comforting anchor than a harrying tormentor. How much better to feel led by event time – placing your actions at the centre of a life that unfolds in meaningful chapters?