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Category: time
Quotes of Category: time
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  1. Paul Davies _ About Time: Einstein's

    is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed-or, to make the analogy closer, that is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?
    book-quotetimerealitytime-passing

  2. Paul Davies _ About Time: Einstein's

    Perhaps there are many "nows" of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect, structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time in quite different ways. This is evidently the case in terms of response time. You have probably had the slightly unnerving experience of jumping at the sound of a telephone a moment or two before you actually hear it ring. The shrill noise induces a reflex response through the nervous system much faster than the time it takes to create the conscious experience of the sound.It is fashionable to attribute certain qualities, such as speech ability, to the left side of the brain, whereas others, such as musical appreciation, belong to processes occurring on the right side. But why should both hemispheres experience a common time? And why should the subconscious use the same mental clock as the conscious?
    book-quotetimetime-passingphysics

  3. Paul Davies _ About Time: Einstein's

    Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before.In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences-red spot, green spot-smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book , philosopher points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?
    book-quotetimerealitypsychology

  4. Paul Davies _ About Time: Einstein's

    Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five {sic} frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second.In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience-but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.
    book-quotetimerealitytime-passing

  5. Doris Lessing _ Prisons We Choose to Live

    Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.
    book-quotesciencetime

  6. Marshall McLuhan _ The Mechanical Bride: Folklore

    The formula for this brand of "historical" writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can be argued that a man has to live somewhere, and that if his own time is so cut up by rapid change that he can't find a cranny big enough to relax in, then he must betake himself to the past. That is certainly one motive in the production of historical romance, from Sir Walter Scott to Thornton Wilder. But mainly this formula works as a means of flattery. The public is not only invited inside but encouraged to believe that there is nothing inside that differs from its own thoughts and feelings. This reassurance is provided by endowing historical figures with the sloppiest possible minds. The great are "humanized" by being trivial.The debunking school began by making the great appear as corrupt, or mean and egotistical. The "humanizers" have merely carried on to make them idiotic. "Democratic" vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway's heroes. Just as the new star must be made to appear successful by reason of some freak of fortune, so the great, past or present, must be made to seem so because of the most ordinary qualities, to which fortune adds an unearned trick or idea."
    book-quotetruthtimepast

  7. William Blake _ The Marriage of Heaven and

    The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
    book-quotetimewisdom

  8. William Blake _ The Marriage of Heaven and

    Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
    book-quotetime

  9. H. Rider Haggard _ She: A History of Adventure

    Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.
    book-quoteknowledgetimelearning

  10. H. Rider Haggard _ She: A History of Adventure

    Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?
    book-quotetimechangefree-will

  11. Drexel Deal _ The Fight of My Life is

    Parents need to see that every situation that their kids find themselves in is a teaching situation, and they need to take the time to explore cost and effect. So talking to your children, explaining things to children as to why things happen in the world. Getting them to see cost and relationships between events is the best way to increase comprehension skills. Daynette Gardiner, the best School Psychologist in The Bahamas.
    book-quotetimeparenthoodteachable-moments

  12. Charles Bukowski

    the tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die an
    timepeopletiredsunsets
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