Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of mankind’s attempt to understand the nature of time. At the end of the 19th century, H.G.Wells imagined travelling through time in The Time Machine; “The palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space”. When he was writing we thought time was unbending and universal and counted out by Newton’s clock. A hundred years later we have had Einstein and relativity, quantum theory, and atomic clocks, but in the third millennium, is mankind any closer to understanding what time really is? What, in short, do we know about time itself? A Greek philosopher thought that time was a figment of the imagination and there are contemporary physicists who go a long way to agreeing with him. Newton’s views on time were bent by Einstein. The ancient skills of astronomy once ruled the known world and skill in time usage could be said to be enthroned as a master craft in our day. “But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity” - Marvel wrote that of love, but it could be our epigraph for time. With Dr Neil Johnson, theoretical physicist at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University and Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer 1999 on the subject of Time; Lee Smolin, cosmologist and Professor of Physics, Pennsylvania State University.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading the inartime podcast. For more details about inartime and for our terms of use |
| 0:05.4 | Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program |
| 0:11.9 | Hello at the end of the last century HG Wells imagined and traveling through time in the time machine |
| 0:17.4 | The palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous grain as the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue |
| 0:24.3 | A splendid luminous color like that of early twilight the jerking sun became a streak of fire a brilliant arch in space |
| 0:31.2 | When he was writing we thought time was unbending and universal and counted out by Newton's clock a hundred years later |
| 0:37.7 | We have Einstein and relativity quantum theory and atomic clocks |
| 0:41.2 | But as we stand on the cusp of the third millennium is mankind any closer to understanding what time really is |
| 0:47.7 | With me is the theoretical physicist Dr. Neal Johnson from the Clarenndon laboratory at Oxford University |
| 0:53.2 | Here's this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on the subject of time |
| 0:56.7 | I'm also joined by the cosmologist Lee Smolin professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University who's currently on a year |
| 1:03.0 | sabbatical at Imperial College |
| 1:04.5 | Here's the author of the life of the cosmos Neal Johnson |
| 1:08.3 | What's the best way of characterising Newtonian time? |
| 1:12.2 | It's really a clock in the sky for all to see very much like in the birth of the railroads when there was one clock in the center of the |
| 1:20.6 | Station which set the time for the town in which the station was it was a universal time the Newton idea is that |
| 1:28.1 | There's a clock in the sky for everybody in the universe to see everybody agrees on that time no matter how far |
| 1:33.7 | They are away and no matter how what they're doing at the particular moment when they look at the clock |
| 1:38.5 | So the big clocks in the sky is regulating life on earth, but is it independent of it? |
| 1:42.5 | Yes, yes, the the idea is that it doesn't matter whether you're sitting down you're traveling around in a bus or you're in the |
| 1:50.5 | Starship Enterprise at the time is the same for everybody. What was time like as it were before Newton arrived in terms of how |
| 1:59.6 | Bodies and objects moved through time that was of course a mystery until Newton came along |
... |
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