A MATTER OF TIME

"No one really knows what time is," declared physicist and author Hans Christian von Baeyer in his spring presentation for the Penn Humanities Forum. Before Einstein, scientists agreed with Newton, who posited "absolute, true, and mathematical time," an equitable sovereign who parceled out cosmic standard time in unvarying beats.

"One thing we know for certain now," von Baeyer told listeners, "is that Newton was wrong."

St. Augustine once posed the question, What is time? and famously responded, "If no one asks me, I know it. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know it not."

Von Baeyer, by the end of his talk—entitled That Relentless Whirligig—was himself reduced to swirling his thumbs over his fingertips, as though sampling the texture of some invisible substance. Investigators, he speculated, when they reach "the bottom of the deep frontier," might find the stuff of space-time to be "quantum foam."

Yeats called time "an endless song." Shakespeare alluded to the "noiseless foot of time." Pasternak brooded that each of us is "a captive of time," while Ovid rhapsodized darkly over "[t]ime the devourer of all things." Ben Franklin, ever practical in all matters, advised that "time is money."

One of the country’s main timekeepers is housed in the laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST-F1, an atomic clock whose cesium 133 pendulum ticks over 9 billion times a second, is accurate to within 0.0000000000000015 of a second. It will neither lose nor gain one second in 20 million years.

Such astonishing precision is wasted on a character like Dunbar in the novel Catch-22. The death-haunted bomber pilot cultivated boredom, embracing tedium to slow down time and thus "increase" the span of his allotted years.

"Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?" he pleaded.

"This long," came his reply, accompanied by a finger snap.

The great science fiction writer H.G. Wells tried to imagine the sensations of time travel in his story The Time Machine. When the tale’s nameless protagonist mounted his invention and flung himself into the future, everything heaved, melted, and flowed around him. "[T]he dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes…seemed built of glimmer and mist," he recounted as the machine accelerated to one year per minute. Not just objective reality but even the substantiality of the traveler himself became doubtful. "I was, so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapor through the interstices of intervening substances." To convince themselves he was real, the denizens of year 803,701 felt compelled to touch the startling apparition from the past, stroking his back and shoulders. Steadfast NIST-F1 would still be telling the time meticulously in that far-off future, but the Time Traveler slipped through it like quantum foam. When he finally pulled the lever that launched the time machine into a more remote future, the voyager wavered and departed "like a ghost."

Inspired by the selection of time as the theme for this year’s Penn Humanities Forum, we set out on our own voyage of exploration in this issue of PENN Arts & Sciences. We don’t claim to settle any of the disputes that enlivened this year’s Forum, but we do embrace the quiet hope that Aeschylus put forth two and a half millennia ago: "Time as he grows old teaches all things."