The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  Politics dictates time, but so does geography. At the North and South Poles, for instance, there are no time zones, because here all the globe’s lines of longitude converge. At latitude 90° north, where the ice is constantly shifting, there are also no permanent residents, and so this Arctic spot is technically time free. Polar explorers have a few options when deciding what time to call it: they can choose to use a time that’s convenient; they can use the time of their home country; or they can use Greenwich Mean Time, just like astronauts who circle the planet sixteen times a day.

  The fact that everyone in the world has to set their clocks by a standard set by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, is a clue that the way we inhabit the global realm of time is not something natural. It is a technology, and like many technologies it arose from a practical need.

  The reason the prime meridian runs through Greenwich and not somewhere else is that this particular town was the scene of an epic eighteenth-century battle between the two timekeepers of the age: astronomers and clockmakers, who were fighting over who could claim to provide the most accurate method for timekeeping. The stargazers mapped out time from the heavens, as they had done for ages, while the clockmakers put their faith in their own hands and their ability to build timekeeping machines.

  For mariners, the ability to tell the time was not a trivial issue. It was a matter of life or death. It was also a matter of national interest. In 1714 Parliament offered a prize of £20,000—millions of dollars in today’s money—to the first person who could accurately chart longitude. While latitude, north or south, could be determined by the position of the sun, longitude was far more difficult to establish once land was out of sight. The night sky could be used to navigate, as it had been for centuries, but it wasn’t particularly accurate, and of course navigators might want to know where they were during the day. During daylight hours, having an accurate record of the time was critical for measuring the distance a ship had travelled east or west. It was easy to see what time it was locally, but only by comparing local time with the hour back home could they know how far they were from home. And to do that, they needed a clock.

  As Dava Sobel notes in her book Longitude, “One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the equator to virtually nothing at the poles….For lack of a practical method of determining longitude, every great captain in the Age of Exploration became lost at sea despite the best available charts and compasses.”

  In the end, the problem was solved by a master clockmaker named John Harrison, who made a clock so precise that it lost only a third of a second per day. And as sea clocks, or chronometers, spread, so too did the British Empire. Thus, it was not only “guns, germs and steel,” to reference Jared Diamond’s book, that aided Britannia in conquering new lands, it was also the empire’s mastery over time. According to horologists, the technology of chronometers empowered the British to “rule the waves” and conquer new lands beyond them.

  Time, however, is not just imaginary lines. As a dimension, time may be invisible to us, but we can feel its presence. We can see the effect of time on our bodies as we age and witness its cycles on the planetary body in the seasonal flush of greens, reds, and whites. People have long relied on nature to tell the time in this way, including in the beautiful form of flowers. In 1750, the Swedish botanist and famed taxonomist Carl Linnaeus came up with a clever idea for timekeeping. He drew the plans for what he called a horologium florae, or flower clock. Knowing that certain plants bloom at certain times of day, he surmised that you could tell the time just by looking at a garden and seeing which flowers were in bloom.

  Linnaeus called these special plants aequinoctales. The day lily, hawkweed, garden lettuce, and marigold were some of the species he had observed opening at specific hours. And so, a working flower clock, as poet Tom Clark imagines it, would contain a garden that looks something like this:

  6 AM Spotted Cat’s-ear opens

  7 AM African Marigold opens

  8 AM Mouse-ear Hawkweed opens

  9 AM Prickly Sow-thistle closes

  10 AM Nippleworth closes

  11 AM Star of Bethlehem opens

  Linnaeus’s flower clock was never really going to catch on, because for most of the plants he observed, the time at which their flowers opened depended not on a particular hour per se but on the amount of daylight they received. Flowers are local clocks. Under the long summer sun, flowers at the northern latitude of Uppsala, Sweden, would not open at the same time as they would in Brooklyn, New York.

  Sight, however, is not the only way to tell the time of day; we can also do it through sound. While we are all familiar with alarm buzzers and school bells, nature’s wake-up call still comes to us in the form of birdsong. The Horological Journal reports that you can tell time through this “ornithological clock” if you know when specific bird species sing. For example, the green chaffinch (“the earliest riser among all the feathered tribes”) sings from 1:30 to 2 A.M., the black cap follows from 2 to 3:30, next is the hedge sparrow from 3 to 3:30, the blackbird from 3:30 to 4, the larks from 4 to 4:30, the black-headed titmouse chirps in from 4:30 to 5:00, and finally the sparrow sings in the dawn from 5 to 5:30. But again, nature’s clock can’t be replicated, because it’s both location-and bird-specific.

  Beyond sound and sight, there’s another sense we can use to tell time as well. During the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279), the Chinese built incense clocks to smell the hours passing. As Robert Levine writes in A Geography of Time, “This wooden device consisted of a series of connected small same-sized boxes. Each box held a different fragrance of incense. By knowing the time it took for a box to burn its supply, and the order in which the scents burned, observers could recognize the time of day by the smell in the air.”

  These are just some of the methods our species has used to tell time, but humans aren’t the only creatures who are timekeepers. Many animals—like bees, rats, and cicadas, to name a few—are known to track the passage of time accurately. But one key question often arises: Are these animals telling the time based on external environmental cues like the sun, or is there some other biological clock that lets them track the time internally?

  One of the best-known studies to examine how animals experience time was done by scientists Max Renner and Karl von Frisch in 1955. It was known that common honeybees often fly off to feed at the same time each day and that they could also be trained to scout for food at specific times. The researchers wanted to find out if a change in time zone would affect the bees’ behaviour. So, they placed forty honeybees in a sealed room in Paris and trained them to arrive for dinner each night between 8:15 and 10:15 P.M. The researchers kept the light, temperature, and humidity in the room constant. Then one night in between feedings, Renner packed the bees up in a box and took them across the Atlantic. When he opened the box again, the bees were in an identical sealed room but this time in New York City.

  The question was, when would the bees come out to feed? Was there some external cue related to Earth’s position and unrelated to sunlight that would prompt the bees to feed at 8:15 P.M. New York time? The bees answered the question by emerging in the middle of the afternoon, at 3:15 P.M., proving that they were indeed tracking time internally, because it was exactly 8:15 P.M., or dinnertime, in Paris.

  In the South Pacific, another creature is known for its precise timing: the palolo worm. Each year, the sea worms take part in a massive spawning event that brings millions of them to the water’s surface, as they have synchronized their mating to the phases of the moon. For the locals, this orgy is also a gastronomical feast. As an article in National Geographic notes, “The worms are fried in oil or baked into a loaf with coconut milk and onions. A new daily special shows up on local restaurant menus: palolo worm on toast. It’s considered quite a delicacy.” In fact, in Vanuatu, the event is of such great importance that it is marked in the lunar calendar.

&nb
sp; So how does an animal as seemingly simple as a worm know how to tell the time? Studying a different species of marine worm, Platynereis dumerilii, neurobiologist Kristin Tessmar-Raible has found evidence of a biological lunar clock. In a lab setting, using LEDs and standard light bulbs, she found that worms raised in an aquarium with the lights constantly on or off never developed reproductive cycles. But if the lights were turned on for a set period to act as an artificial moon, the worms would synch up with their own circadian clock.*2 The exact mechanism behind the behaviour still remains a mystery, but the worms do have light-sensitive neurons in their brains. Researchers believe this triggers some kind of repeating neural circuit so that “something in the body preserves the memory of those nocturnal illuminations.”

  Of course, the human animal also has a circadian rhythm. Like most creatures, our daily cycle is synched to the sun, and while it’s not a perfect twenty-four-hour match, it is still remarkably close. Harvard University researchers found that the average person’s internal clock runs on a cycle of twenty-four hours and eleven minutes, with most subjects off by just plus or minus sixteen minutes.

  Scientists were curious to see if the human circadian rhythm could be tricked in the same way as the bees. To find out, in 1972, a geologist named Michel Siffre agreed to take part in a NASA-funded study where he would spend six months alone in a cave in Del Rio, Texas. The goal? To discover how the human body would respond to long-term isolation. Siffre would not starve in the cave. He had his basic needs taken care of: plenty of food and water, and he could even control the temperature and artificial lights. Aside from that, though, he had no external cues like sunlight or the seasons to mark his time inside.

  As a seasoned cave explorer, Siffre found the first two months relatively easy. He read Plato, listened to records, and explored his new surroundings. As a part of the study, electrodes were attached to his body to monitor his brain, heart, and muscle activity. He also kept a journal detailing his experience. One of the key findings was that without daylight to calibrate his internal clock, Siffre’s body loosened itself from the twenty-four-hour day and found a different cycle of time. Periodically, he would stay up for thirty-two hours and sleep for sixteen. And a couple of times, his body tuned to a forty-eight-hour cycle for a while, though the range generally shifted from eighteen to fifty-two hours.

  Inside the cave and without much light, time’s boundaries began to erase. “I believe that when you are surrounded by night—the cave was completely dark, with just a light bulb—your memory does not capture the time,” he said. “You forget. After one or two days, you don’t remember what you have done a day or two before. The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Besides that, it’s entirely black. It’s like one long day.”

  By day seventy-nine, Siffre had not only begun to lose track of time, he had begun to lose his mind. With no outside contact, the desolation he felt was overwhelming. His only “friend” was a mouse that came to steal his supplies. So it came as a terrible loss when one day, he accidentally crushed the mouse (he was attempting to catch it with a casserole dish to make it his pet); now, with nobody around to keep him company, his depression worsened. Siffre began to contemplate suicide. He became so steeped in this mental darkness that when a lightning storm outside sent electricity coursing through his cardiac electrodes, he was so psychologically numb he let it happen four times before he even thought to remove the wires.

  Finally, on day 179, he was brought out. The study had been torturous, but if there was one small blessing it was this: Siffre had thought that less time had passed in the cave. In subsequent studies it’s been found that isolation from external cues dilates time. Siffre thought he had been in the cave for only 151 days.

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  AS A DIMENSION, time reaches far beyond human scale and perception. That’s because the true nature of time is not only deep but infinite, stretching from the Big Bang right down to the present moment. In Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, the Sanskrit word kalpa refers to this elongated time, with each kalpa lasting an eon of 4.32 billion human years. This stretching of time shifts our perceptions *3 and in a way gives us a better sense of where we lie on the continuum. Imagine, for instance, if instead of the year 2020 we marked the date from a different point of origin. That is, if we counted not from the birth of Christ but from the birth of the solar system. How differently would we see our time on Earth if we wrote the date as January 26, 4.543 billion?

  On the hyper-immediate scale, we also speak of quick time. If you hear someone say “I’ll be there in two shakes” or “in a jiffy,” colloquially that means they will be there soon or right away. But a “jiffy” in electronics has a more precise meaning. It refers to the period of an alternating current power cycle, or 1/60 of a second. A “shake,” on the other hand, is defined as ten nanoseconds, or 10–8 seconds, and is used in physics as a measure of timing chain reactions in a nuclear explosion.

  For non-scientists, what we generally speak of when we refer to time is what we experience on a human scale. For most of history, time was somewhat tangible. Our own bodies kept track of day and night, and stellar bodies marked our seasons and astronomical calendars. The sun, the biggest and brightest star in our sky, is the solar body we still use to mark the passing of time. For the ancient Egyptians, when the sun went down, measurement of time itself disappeared, and this remained the case with Roman sundials. As the motto on one sundial read, “Absque sole, absque usu,” or “Without sun, without use.”

  The water clock, or clepsydra, was the first device that marked the passage of time after sunset, using a measured quantity of water that took a known period of time to drip through a hole in a vessel. Hourglasses, used primarily for decoration today, similarly keep time using gravity.

  In different parts of the world, time has been measured in ways that we might now consider rather peculiar. As historian E.P. Thompson notes, “In Madagascar time might be measured by ‘a rice-cooking’ (about half an hour) or ‘the frying of a locust’ (a moment). The Cross River natives were reported as saying ‘the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted’ (less than fifteen minutes).” Time was not an abstract construct but a real measure framed by the typical duration of events. But all timekeeping methods of the past—from using the stars to water, and from cooked rice to fried locusts—were still measures of the transformation of physical bodies. It was not until the invention of the clock that time became a measure entirely unto itself.

  Today, if you look down at your wristwatch, you are seeing a time that the watch itself created. That is, clock time is a human invention. That’s why we still say “of the clock,” abbreviated to “o’clock.” The distinction between clock time and lived time used to be important, but today “o’clock” time is almost universal. Few of us measure the time of day by the rise and fall of tidal rivers or the placement of the stars. Time is no longer a dimensional flow that we, along with the rest of nature, inhabit but rather a construct, a “thing,” that orders our lives and that we must obey.

  That is not to say that having coordinated time is a bad idea. Before we were in synch, appointments were hard to schedule and most meetings had to be made at a clear and specific time, like dawn. Time being inexact in the past also meant it was flexible. And in many parts of the world today, you will find that time is still not a rigid entity. That’s one of the reasons why people love the experience of “island time.” For travellers, it takes over from the rigorous pace of the modern world. Here, time does not control the locals, because it is the locals who control time.

  Localized time is how we experienced time for most of history. The first mechanical clocks appeared around the early fourteenth century and used something called a verge escapement. In essence, a weighted mechanism shifts back and forward to move a toothed wheel. This created the tick, or the beat, of time. These early clocks were placed in town centres and churches and signalled the tim
ing of public events. A century later, in the early 1500s, German locksmith Peter Henlein invented the first watch. He also became the manufacturer of the first pocket watches, in 1524. These portable clocks shrank time devices down in a manner similar to how personal computers shrank to the size of cell phones. And like the first cell phones, these new clocks were expensive. Henlein’s creations were affordable only for the rich.

  It was not until the early 1800s that portable timepieces entered the mainstream. To determine longitude, mariners became the first early adopters of portable chronometers. In 1737, only one chronometer existed, but by 1815 there were over five thousand. It was in fact the military that popularized the use of wristwatches. In 1880, Swiss watchmaker Constant Girard mass-produced two thousand wristwatches for German naval officers. By the First World War, these wristwatches, or “trench watches,” as they came to be known, allowed soldiers to coordinate their movements without having to rummage through their rucksacks to find a pocket watch. For aviators, a wristwatch was literally handy, as it allowed them to keep both hands on the controls.

  Time, though, still kept its own local pace around the world. And the pressure to create a global time based on European measures met with resistance. As Ian Beacock writes in The Atlantic, in his article “A Brief History of (Modern) Time,” changing local time to a standardized time in some cases led to violent opposition:

  In January 1906, several thousand cotton-mill workers rioted on the outskirts of Bombay. Refusing to work at their looms, they pelted factories with rocks, their revolt soon spreading to the heart of the city, where more than 15,000 citizens signed petitions and marched angrily in the streets. They were protesting the proposed abolition of local time in favour of Indian Standard Time, to be set five-and-a-half hours ahead of Greenwich. To early 20th-century Indians, this looked like yet another attempt to crush local tradition and cement Britannia’s rule. It wasn’t until 1950, three years after Indian independence, that a single time zone was adopted nationwide. Journalists called this dispute the “Battle of the Clocks.” It lasted nearly half a century.