Soul of the World

by Christopher Dewdney

  Clocks have become so accurate now that a curious thing has happened: they have outstripped the master clock—the earth’s revolution—that clockmakers have always used to calibrate their most precise chronometers. With the advent of the atomic clock, the yearly slowing of the earth’s revolutions could be measured accurately—and it turned out to be three milliseconds a year. The earth was now an unreliable timepiece. But that wasn’t all: the earth was also becoming an irregular timepiece. When the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 struck, it changed the angular momentum of the planet’s spin, speeding it up like a spinning figure skater pulling her arms closer to her body. As a consequence our days are now three millionths of a second shorter. But the divorce of abstract time from earthly time is far from complete, and there is an ongoing battle between astronomers and physicists about what our atomic timepieces should be based on. Astronomers argue for “natural time,” where leap seconds are added every few years to accommodate the slowing earth, while physicists argue for “technological time,” the final separation of time from its earthly orgins. The earth might yet be relegated to chronological history.

  And all the while, smaller and smaller durations of time, like the bays within bays of a shoreline, continue to be discovered. The femtosecond, one millionth of a billionth of a second, was measured soon after the nanosecond. From the perspective of the femtosecond we humans are unmoving statues that exist an eternity. There could be a whole civilization overlapped with our own for whom femtoseconds are like our seconds. The Femtonians could be living invisibly among us as if we were so many figurines. Should their science became advanced enough, a genius among them might announce that the statues are not utterly unchanging, but that they are, in fact, moving! Controversy would erupt. It would be well known that, although most of the statues’ eyes are open, some are half-closed, while a minority are completely closed. Using comparison photographs gathered from over a century, the Femtonian scientist would show how the eyelids of a particular statue with half-closed eyes have moved incrementally over the decades. “Preposterous!” would be the response from the dissenting scientists. “How could statues move? I suppose next you’ll be telling us they’re alive?”

  But the Femtonians have already been usurped by a smaller, faster civilization. Briefer even than femtoseconds are attoseconds, clocking at a staggeringly tiny portion of time: a billionth of a billionth of a second. From the perspective of an attosecond, one of our seconds lasts three million years, the same amount of time it took humans to evolve. Yet still smaller units of time are being sought after. David Blair, an Australian physicist, has built the most accurate clock yet in order to try and measure gravitational waves. Even though they knit our galaxy together, gravitational waves are ineffable, with extraordinarily weak emissions. They have never been detected. Blair hopes his new clock will be fast enough to catch them. His timepiece is not as stable as an atomic clock over long periods, but in the short term it is accurate to one part in a hundred trillion over three hundred seconds. At its heart is a sapphire crystal that is kept at –273° Celsius in a bath of liquid helium, capable of measuring a trillion-trillionth of a second.

  At this scale of duration the only events that move fast enough to be measured are sub-atomic events: the lifetime of quarks and the breaking of atomic bonds. It is a jumpy, quivering world of electrons and particles. And that’s where everything converges. If our coastline surveyors insisted on measuring the entire edge of their shoreline—attending to smaller and smaller inlets and points until they were accounting for edges of pebbles, then grains of sand, then molecules and finally the edges of atoms—they would arrive at the same place, the same time frame as a cesium clock. You have to have a very fast ruler to measure subatomic shorelines; they keep changing. There comes a point, at the infinitesimal scale of things, where not only time and mass converge but also gravity and light. In that tiny, furiously quick world, light moves like molasses and mass disappears into energy. Perhaps, as Blair hopes, the secret of gravity might be lurking there as well.

  But if clocks get more accurate, particularly if they become accurate to within a millisecond in three million years, then, due to relativistic effects, simply walking around with one will slow it down measurably. Also, elevation will change the pace, since time runs slower at the surface of the planet than higher up. This effect is already measurable. Due to relativity, clocks at the top of Mount Everest run faster than those at sea level, pulling ahead by about thirty microseconds a year. Time too, when reduced to its smallest parts, becomes slippery and indeterminate. It may well be that there is a limit beyond which the smallest portions of time cannot be measured.

  AND YET…

  “Now,” from the perspective of an attosecond, is a very fleeting thing, impossible to seize. It makes our “now” seem to stretch for an eternity, at least relatively, even if, from our perspective, the present moment is as mercurial as any small division of time. Because it is all we have, this small moment is also the most precious, an oasis in the sands of time. Yet “now” has another scale, in the opposite direction from the abyss of milliseconds and nanoseconds. There is a bigger “now.”

  In terms of our consensual “now,” the one we all agree on, we consciously occupy a slice, perhaps a quarter of a second, and that is our time frame. Most living things on the earth exist in the same “now” as we do. You could argue that starfish and plants exist in a “now” with a longer wavelength than ours; their purposeful movements can only be seen with time-lapse photography. Conversely some insects and pygmy marmosets seem to exist in a faster, narrower “now.” Computers, though not yet conscious or living beings, operate in an even briefer “now,” just nanoseconds long. But these are the fine-grained “nows,” like the fast end of my Olympic time clock. In the other direction, “now” is coarse.

  When politicians or historians say “now,” they often mean the current period, the “way certain things are” presently. That “now” is not as brief as the personal and universal “now,” the vanishing trace that skims from past to future like a cursor carrying our awareness along with it. The cultural “now” can be much larger, a decade or longer, yet it is still correct to call it now. In that sense “now” can encompass centuries, even millennia.

  In geological terms, “now” is very precisely located. It is nested within an increasingly bigger series of well-defined time periods. “Now” in geological terms is defined as the Holocene epoch, which began about eleven thousand years ago, while humans were still in the hunter-gatherer stage. The Holocene epoch is itself part of the Quaternary period, which started two million years ago. And the Quaternary period is only a small part of a much larger portion of time, the Cenozoic era, also called the age of mammals. It began roughly sixty-five million years ago, immediately after the Mesozoic era, the age of dinosaurs. So you could argue that in that sense “now” is sixty-five million years long.

  From the perspective of that long, resounding “now,” my neighbourhood transforms into an unfamiliar tableau, an interlude of stillness, a single frame in a time-lapse film that has been running since the beginning of the planet. The maples and oaks and hickories, whose crowns are solid with leaves, become opportunistic, temporary species inhabiting a brief niche in a tumultuous ecology of plants and creatures that appear, flourish and then die away. But the buildings amidst the trees take on an even stranger appearance. These comfortable brick houses I can see from my study window transform into something almost peculiar—the geometric dwellings of a particularly successful species of primate that, in the blink of an eye, has covered the planet.

  Chapter Four

  ZENO’S HORSE: MANIPULATING TIME

  I might have slept through a lesser storm, but last night Zeus was out for blood. A window-rattling bang woke me with my heart skidding. As soon as I opened my eyes, the bedroom was lit up by a lightning flash, then another, then a peal of thunder that sounded like housesized boulders being dropped on a steel floor. Sleep was out of the questio
n. I got up and went to the window. Outside was pandemonium. Lightning flashed every few seconds, each stroke followed instantly by thunder. The storm was right on top of me. No steamboats.

  The branches of the tree in front of my house were flailing in terrific gusts, and the almost continuous flickering of the purple-white lightning—like a strobe light—captured the movement of the leaves and branches in stop-motion. I saw the wet green of the new maple leaves as they twisted and fluttered in the wind. Above the tree, lightning bolts laced the sky like instant maps of dazzling rivers.

  It was a terrific spectacle, and I watched until the gaps between the lightning and the thunder stretched longer and longer and the flashes began to fade in the distance. Finally the storm abated, on its way to the countryside to startle sleeping cattle and to drench fields. I went back to bed thankful I wasn’t camping.

  This morning I got up to a quiet, sunny day, the second Friday of May. Except for wet soil and some downed branches on the back lawn, you’d never guess at the violence of the night before. But the flowers on the rhododendron in my back garden had begun to unclench. They had been reluctant all week amid the fading glories of the daffodils and tulips, holding their spade-shaped buds closed like pointed temple domes. By noon I could see small, crimson puffs where the petals of individual flowers were emerging from their clusters. I sat down on the lawn beside the rhododendron and improvised a special state of mind. I slowed myself down, became calm. I tried to remember what few shreds of meditation I had learned years ago to slow my metabolism. It was so quiet that I could hear the buzz of insects orbiting nearby flowers.

  I don’t know if I convinced myself that I could see the rhododendron flowers actually blooming, yet I’m sure I watched them open a little in the half-hour I sat looking at them, although knowledge sometimes corrupts experience. Maybe I superimposed memories of flowers blossoming in a time-lapse film I’d seen once. Or did I indeed slow my own time scale to a speed that accelerated the rhododendron’s opening? It didn’t matter in the end. The flowers were a cellular extravaganza; they inflated like miniature lavender thunderheads as myriads of cells divided and divided again inside them. Each petal was granular, with water-plump, semi-transparent cells. The flowers were soft, velvety to the touch. Within them a powerful surge of liquids and sugars pumped them larger and larger. Yet it was slow.

  I got up and went back into the house. The interior was cool compared to the backyard, and the oak staircase leading to the second floor was fragrant in the humidity and slightly moist to the touch. I worked for a few hours and later that afternoon went out to look at the rhododendron. Six flower clusters had now fully opened. Their purple petals were glossy and perfect in the hot sun, and the tips of their stamens, deep within the cool, amethyst chambers of their cups, were already dusted with pollen. Everything else was blossoming as well: the lilies, the hostas, even my neighbour’s mock orange. But the maples were way ahead. They had lost their flowers, and clusters of winged seeds hung from the branches amidst the leaves. Too soon, it seemed. Sooner every year. A flower in the tree, a seed in the flower, a tree in the seed.

  THE STANFORD PEGASUS

  One sunny June morning in 1878, at a racetrack in Palo Alto, California, the world changed. Eadweard Muybridge stopped time. The cameras he used to freeze a galloping horse in mid-stride had been invented only thirty-nine years earlier by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, and by today’s standards the photographic technology of the Victorian era was still very primitive. But Muybridge was a visionary and an inventor. He tweaked an extraordinary performance out of his modified daguerreotype cameras and that morning they revealed a new realm of time. Within days newspapers around the world were printing handdrawn copies of his equine photographs (newspapers could not yet reproduce photographs), and Muybridge became famous.

  An inventor as well as a grand eccentric in the Victorian tradition, Muybridge had immigrated to America from England at an early age, settling in San Francisco. As a young man he became fascinated by the new medium of photography and quickly developed a reputation as a landscape photographer. Over the previous two decades photography had revolutionized portraiture and landscape art. People unable to afford paintings of themselves or their children or of picturesque landscapes could now hire photographers.

  There was something magic about photographs, particularly of people. These were not painted interpretations, but direct images. Time was arrested at the point at which the photograph was taken, allowing people to revisit the past directly, through these little windows into history. It was the beginning of a kind of virtual time travel that we now take for granted. We hardly ever marvel at the fact that when you look into the lens of a camera that’s about to take your picture, you’re looking into the future, while posterity looks back at you out of its glass eye.

  I’ve always been fascinated by a daguerreotype of my grandmother taken when she was a young woman in Europe. She is in half profile, her hair up in a languorous coiffure, a few studied strands trailing over her ears. She is wearing a tailored dress with a high, elegant collar adorned with a silver pin. Her shoulders are draped in a fur wrap, and a magnificent black ostrich-feather hat surmounts everything. She is striking. And she is young, perhaps only eighteen. There is something immediately accessible about this photograph; it seems much more recent than its hundred and ten years. You can see by a faint stiffness to her pose that the photographer had told her to remain still. The exposure must have taken a few seconds.

  It was this limitation of still photography that irked Muybridge. He wanted to go further into the instantaneous, to photograph the moving world. He began to experiment with new lenses and shutters to increase the speed of his camera, and by 1870 his diligence had paid off. His pioneering photographs of moving people and animals astonished audiences at exhibitions, and his work gained him a national reputation. Leland Stanford, a retired railway engineer and horse breeder, invited him to his ranch in Sacramento, where, in 1873, he began to fund Muybridge’s research into motion photography.

  Muybridge used Stanford’s horses as his subjects, photographing them as they walked, trotted and galloped. In order to photograph the thoroughbreeds, he had to improve his shutter speed even further. Normally, the daguerreotype cameras of his day had an exposure time of several seconds; sitting for a portrait, as my grandmother had done, meant that you had to remain absolutely still for the duration of the exposure. This would not do for a galloping horse. Muybridge developed faster shutter speeds and film until, by 1877, he had achieved a shutter speed of 1/2,000 of a second, at the limit of what the most accurate clocks of his day could measure. He could now photograph a world previously invisible to the human eye: the realm of the super-fast.

  Stanford had an ulterior motive for hiring Muybridge. In the nineteenth century there was an ongoing argument as to whether or not a galloping horse ever lifted all four hooves off the ground. One side, the pragmatists, claimed that a running horse needed to have at least one hoof on the ground: otherwise it would stumble. The other side, the romantics, said that a horse became airborne in mid-stride, and they called their version of equine locomotion “unsupported transit.” It was a difficult point to settle. Neither group could claim precedence because no one could actually see what was going on beneath a galloping horse. Anything that takes place in less than a tenth of second is beyond our ability to discern clearly.

  On the morning of June 14, 1878, racing enthusiasts and newspapermen lined the track at Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. On one side of the track stood a whitewashed shed with a long, horizontal window that opened at waist level. Poking through the window, like cannons through portholes, were a dozen cameras, each fitted with two lenses. Across from them Muybridge had set up a white canvas backdrop marked with vertical lines at two-foot intervals. The track had been laid with electric trip wires to trigger each of the cameras’ shutters in succession as the horse ran by.

  When everything was ready the horse and rider set off on th
eir journey into time and history. The cameras worked without a hitch. Muybridge quickly developed the photos and the results were stunning: perfect images of horse and rider caught in frames of time less than 1/2,000 of second long. And when the horse was in mid-stride, all four hooves were off the ground. The “unsupported transit” believers won the day. Human perception, assisted by technology, had moved beyond its natural limits. Time within time began to open up.

  As reproductions of these photographs began to circulate around the world, visual artists were especially intrigued. French poet and art critic Paul Valéry wrote that Muybridge’s pictures “laid bare all the mistakes that sculptors and painters had made in their renderings of the various postures of the horse.” This was true. The “hobby horse” pose used by painters to depict galloping horses before Muybridge—both front and hind legs extended—was proven incorrect. Some artists, like Edgar Degas, welcomed this realism. Others were outraged. The sculptor Auguste Rodin declared, “It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality, time does not stop.” He had a point: time doesn’t stop. But he was also being disingenuous. A high-speed photograph takes a slice out of time, and that slice has certainly stopped.

  In the end, the Palo Alto spectacle was a photo op. Muybridge and Stanford likely knew the outcome of their drama. But the flies that Stanford’s horses swatted off their shanks with their tails while they were waiting at the starting gate had yet to be captured on film. The hummingbird’s wings had yet to be stilled. It was only a matter of time before they too would be caught in photographic emulsion, like insects in amber.