E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 217 Seiten
Kattan Gribetz / Kaye Time
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-11-069080-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
A Multidisciplinary Introduction
E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 217 Seiten
Reihe: Time and Periodization in History
ISBN: 978-3-11-069080-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
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Wissenschaftler/-innen und Studierrende mit den Schwerpunkten Kul / Scholars and students with a focus on culture studies, history, a
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Part I: Time: An Interdisciplinary Overture
1 Thinking Temporally Today
This book argues that time is culturally constructed, historically contingent, socially differentiated, and disciplinarily specific. In other words, cultural frameworks, historical contexts, social locations, and disciplinary lenses all impact how time is experienced, understood, and described. The basic assumptions that people make about time are neither natural nor universal. Rather, they are products of the societies and communities in which people live and the disciplines that they study. This is true even when such assumptions about time seem natural or biological, bound up with processes such as the rising and setting sun, the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, or the aging of our bodies. Units of time such as years, months, weeks, days, and hours, as well as our experiences of these units and of time’s passage more generally, are created or inherited; they are not inevitable. Moreover, the way in which we divide time and how we decide to use our time are not arbitrary; quite the contrary: they reveal our deepest societal and individual contexts and values. How we choose to organize and spend our time is so often a reflection of what we value or of the values of the societies and communities in which we live.
The sociologist Norbert Elias, in Time: An Essay (1988), argued similarly that marking time is an expression of society, and thus that time and its measurement mean different things in distinct societies. Building upon but also departing from the work of Elias and other sociologists of time, this volume presents many expressions of time, with versions of time in ancient and modern societies and in different disciplines side by side. The aim is to help the reader recognize the multi-facetedness of time from shifting perspectives, rather than to use social constructions of time to trace human social development. Our interest, in other words, centers on the diversity of expressions of time and what that diversity – cultural, historical, social, disciplinary – can teach us about time and the world.
In order to appreciate the diversity of time that emerges when it is understood as dependent upon culture, history, and discipline, we must expand our imaginations. Alan Lightman’s work of speculative fiction, Einstein’s Dreams (1992), helps us in that imaginative project. The book is set in 1905, in Switzerland, during the period in which Albert Einstein worked as a clerk at the patent office and developed his theory of relativity. Lightman’s “Prologue” describes Einstein as a young man, arriving at his office early in the morning and hearing the minutes pass on the ticking clock, his mind carried away with thoughts about how time operates in the universe. The book’s “Interlude” and “Epilogue” similarly depict this confusing period in Einstein’s life, when he was reconceptualizing the fundamental physics of time.
At the heart of Lightman’s book are thirty short chapters, each a fictional dream that Einstein is imagined to have dreamt during this period of his life. The chapter titles are the day, month, and year of the dream. One dream, dated June 2, 1905, begins with “a mushy, brown peach lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken” (Lightman 2004: 79). We soon learn that in this dream, processes of dissolution and decay move backwards: rather than fruits ripening and then rotting, they begin in the trash and slowly harden, gently placed on the table and then eventually back on a tree. We encounter “a withered woman” so old she can barely move, see, hear, or breath. She is presumably on her death bed. “Gradually, the woman gains strength, eats more, loses the heavy lines in her face” (Lightman 2004: 79–80). She regains her hearing, and slowly ventures out of her house. Her hair turns from grey to brown. Soon, she’s a strong woman, laughing, traveling. Then, she is a young child, and finally a baby. “She crawls. She nurses.” In this same dream, a man who stands at the grave of his friend can look forward to a time when that friend will be healthy and meet him for a drink. This dream is incredibly powerful. It prompts readers to consider that one of the temporal processes that we take for granted – the process of aging, of life proceeding from birth to death – is peculiar even as it feels so natural. This dream unsettles the unidirectionality of time even as it highlights that the world indeed operates thusly.
In another dream, dated April 26, 1905, scientists have discovered that time moves more slowly in elevated places. “The effect is miniscule,” we learn, “but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments” (Lightman 2004: 22). People therefore choose to live high in the mountains, avoiding low places such as valleys and plains even for short durations, out of fear of aging more quickly. There are even those who build their homes on stilts, to maximize their height. “Height has become status,” Lightman shares (2004: 23). People only descend these heights for urgent matters, always hurrying. In fact, in our world, gravitational time dilation means that time moves faster the further one is from earth’s surface, the opposite of the scenario described by Lightman in this dream. The underlying principle is quite similar, however: time passes at different rates depending on one’s relative elevation. This phenomenon is real, but so slight that it is not perceptible to humans; the dream’s extreme vividness underscores an aspect of our temporal universe that we might otherwise miss.
A third dream, from April 24, 1905, introduces the idea of two times existing simultaneously: mechanical time and body time. In this world, mechanical time is “as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth … unyielding, predetermined” (Lightman 2004: 18). It depends on clocks of various sorts to organize all aspects of the day, from the time of waking and sleeping to everything in between. Body time, on the other, is flexible, “like a bluefish in a bay” (Lightman 2004: 18), driven by the biological needs of each individual. Some people who live in this world do not believe that mechanical time exists, ignoring the clock towers and their chimes, wearing watches as ornaments rather than timekeepers. Their heartbeat and their hunger dictate their moods and schedules; they eat lunch when they are hungry. Others, though, live by mechanical time, ignoring their bodies. They wake at the same hour each morning and they eat lunch at noon and supper at six, regardless of their hunger. This dream recalls the ancient Roman playwright Plautus’ remarks about a person whose belly was his sundial until he learned how to use an actual sundial, after which it was this new clock technology, rather than the physical sensation of hunger, that dictated when he ought to eat (Plautus 2013: 433; Ker 2009). By crafting two groups of people who relate to time in such radically divergent ways, one according to mechanical time and the other according to body time, Lightman highlights two different aspects of time that co-exist in a single society, such as our own, that uses technology to tell time. The asynchrony between the hour on the clock and the time of one’s body can sometimes be quite stark. In each of Einstein’s “dreams,” a different world is illustrated through its temporality.
Dreams themselves exist in an alternative temporality; when a person sleeps, their consciousness is altered. Dreams represent alternative realities (not just alternative times, though the two are related), often giving form to fears and fantasies. Dreams, in other words, blur time and reality at once. In Lightman’s novel, Einstein imagines new temporal possibilities – alternate temporal realities – in his dreams. These dreams thus play with the blurring of time in the mind and time in the world, prompting us to conceive alternative conceptions of time and to sit with the reality that the world has always contained more than a single notion or practice of time within it.
Einstein’s historical and cultural context is crucial for understanding his work in the field of physics. Time’s relativity – the idea that there can be conflicting times in different places, and that swift movement across space accentuates such relativity – was gaining steam in the late nineteenth century. Einstein reconceptualized the nature of time during an era in which practices of timekeeping were radically changing: electric motor trams, new clock systems, the telegraph, faster trains, and steam boats all altered experiences of time on a daily basis (Radiolab 2009). Einstein’s understanding of time’s relativity made time inextricable from motion in space and the perspective of the observer. While the seventeenth-century Isaac Newton proposed an idea of absolute time, which passes at the same pace anywhere people measure time, Einstein’s approach connected space, motion and time. This made time relative, while light’s speed was constant everywhere. As ever-quicker...
