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Inquiring Minds

166 Alan Burdick - Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

Inquiring Minds

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4848 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2017

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We talk to Alan Burdick, staff writer and former senior editor for The New Yorker, about his most recent book "Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation.”Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0

It's Monday, February 13th, 2017, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

0:07.9

And I'm Kishore Hari. Look, we're back together again. Yay!

0:10.6

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

0:15.6

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters. You can find us online at motherjones.com or inquiringshow.com.

0:24.4

You can also find us on Twitter at inquiringshow and Facebook.

0:27.6

And you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any other podcasting app.

0:37.4

So for the past year or so, I've realized that I have had an obsession for actually many years

0:42.9

previously, but I've decided to try to put it into a creative work. And this is my obsession

0:48.3

with the passage of time. So I've actually been working on a concept album. It's going to be chamber

0:53.7

music, voice and string quartet. And we're going to explore. I'm starting to get nervous, a concept album. It's going to be chamber music, voice and string quartet.

0:55.5

And we're going to explore. I'm starting to get nervous, by the way.

0:57.8

There's going to be science eventually. We're going to explore how Pete, you know, humans, the human relationship with time.

1:05.6

So when across my desk came a book by Alan Burdick, who's a New Yorker writer and just a really great journalist called Why Time Flies, a mostly scientific investigation. I couldn't wait to read it.

1:19.2

Aren't we bad at telling time?

1:21.6

Yep.

1:22.5

Oh, excellent. So it doesn't matter if we're having fun or not. Time is something that eludes us.

1:28.3

Well, you know, it's for one thing, what Alan starts out in his book talking about is the fact that time is the most common noun in the English language.

1:35.3

So all of us are thinking about time at some point. And of course, nowadays, you know, we talk about time going by so quickly with like, you know,

1:44.8

everybody being able to contact you at any time. Does that like actually, you know,

1:49.8

take away all the free time that you have? We don't decompress. We're, you know, working around

1:53.6

the clock. And there's so many like blog posts and self-help books about how to bring back your

1:58.8

time. I mean, Tim Ferriss has built an empire

...

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