Host: Welcome to our weekly political panel. This is a special series we started since the Mayor has asked everyone to reckon with the way we tell time here in Fabula Tempo. This week we have with us head of Local 613 of Service Employees, Ronald Stokowsky, Professor Ridley Somerville from the Department of Physics at FTU and local artist Rockwell Senti. Let’s start with you Proffesor Somerville. Can you set up the discussion a bit for us here?

Prof: Yes, of course and thanks so much for inviting me. It is really an exciting adventure we are on! You are right, it is important to begin with a good frame to the discussion. As I see it, our long debate in Fabula Tempo revolves around one central axis. Two poles that pull away from each other. At one end is the questions of what can be measured and of course along with that what is actually measured. At the other end of the axis, are the more diffuse questions clustered around the idea of our experience of time.

Artist: With respect to the professor, I disagree with this framing. It serves the idea that time is just this thing we can measure if you cluster all our other ideas about it in a group of questions about experience. If this generational debate has taught us anything it is that time is much more flexible than any of us initially imagined. Time is noisy, yes, but sometimes wonderful new sounds emerge from the chaos.

Prof: But the chaos can be too much and this is what we want to address. I want diversity but I think we can all agree that not every idea is a good idea. Too much noise can make it impossible to get anything done.

Labour: This is where I think the debate should be centered, on the question of how we get things done… because this question of how we get things done is tied to who gets things done.

Artist: This is too practical! The unions are arguing for too much standardization. Seems like it might just take the fun out of things! I am sympathetic of your gesture toward unity, but in essence you are doubling down on the idea that money is time, so you want a simple standard for the measure of life. We lose all this complexity to have something society you can regulate the exchange of.

Labour: I don’t think it’s that simple. Since the industrial revolution… maybe before that too… I’m not a historian but it feels like forever that technology has been used by those with power to organize the world in a way that benefits them. Part of the motivation to have timezones and the telegraph was to help businesses move things on trains more efficiently. Business loves standardization and optimization…. but its gone so deep into our lives now… like a splinter that becomes a chasm.
Every on demand app that brings things to you with a swipe on your screen, requires labour to lay in wait for your command. The shortening of your time is the lengthening of others… Time is being horded by fewer and fewer in the world, but I don’t see us turning away from all the technology that is helping them reorder time in their favour. Maybe the only way out is through… maybe with all the tech we have now maybe what we can do is have a mechanism that helps redistribute time fairly?

Artist: But I don’t want us to end up with a time that is so centered on work.

Labour: Work touches everything and it always benefits people with more power to move work away from the center.

Artist: The problem is at the center of your idea is still clock time and clock time is essentially just one metaphor for representing time. Like all metaphors we must be careful not to mistake the metaphor for the thing itself. This is what the world is beyond Fabula Tempo. At one point we all began to mistake the metaphor trying to describe an aspect of the world for the world itself, but what happened in our city was that a little splinter became an opening for other metaphors to make their way back in. What we have here is a re-wilding of time and I don’t want to see it tamed again.

Prof: Your description of clock time as a metaphor among metaphors is quite beautiful, but we must be careful not to take the poetics too far. Time is a physical thing, but it’s just that, as you said, it is somewhat more flexible than we originally thought. At the quantum level it even becomes illusive and seems to cease to exist altogether so it is emerging that time may not be as fundamental as we originally thought, but, and this is important, it does not make it less real or measurable.
When physicists say that that there is no single time, this is in the sense that there is no single unifying present… no singular now of the universe. It is a collection of multiple nows and those nows, we call them events, they are unfolding and interacting with one another. So even if at the quantum level time seems to cease to exist, entropy is also undeniable. Milk in your tea cannot unstir itself. There is an arrow of time we can measure. The distinction between a past, a present and a future is real. There is temporal nature to the world around us and we can build a common understanding of this world. This is a task of science I fear we might be pushing too much to the side… we are trying to build a shared understanding of the world not to fragment it into pieces.

Host: Well, this is shaping up to be quite discussion. We don’t often get to talk like this on TV! I want us to keep digging into these ideas so why don’t we see if our producers can move some of our planned programming to another time. While we do that, why don’t we take a commercial break. We’ll be right back after this.

Spaceballs trailer recut with to include the scene about when is now
Fake Advert for James Turrell’s Roden Crater and his quotes about the cosmic time and experiencing our place in it.

Host: Welcome back to part 2 of our political panel. Before the break, Professor Somerville seemed to be suggesting that Rockwell was willfully misinterpreting science in the service of wilder ideas and Mr Stokowsky was pushing for more of a political construction of our understanding of time.

Labour: To be clear, time is already a political construction. We make the tools that measure time. We choose how to use those tools. Often… too often… people like our professor here don’t want to acknowledge the politics, but to paraphrase his own words… this doesn’t make them any less real. I know I end up sounding like a revolutionary here, but when science believes that it can stay neutral, we often see this noble idea of common ground that Professor Somerville was speaking of …. it gets broken up into a series of tragedies of private ownership. The tragedy of the commons with a modern ending. It’s the fences that are the villain. It seems in this world there are more and more landlords of time, taking rent from us all, and it’s harder and harder for working class people to find a minute for themselves.

Host: Ok, Mr Stokowsky that is powerful stuff, and I will come back to Professor Somerville for a response in a moment…. But I want to get Rockwell to expand on something he said about wild time. I assume you don’t just mean a fabulous night out… can you speak a bit more about this.

Artist: Yes, of course… well, I use wild time to speak of all the different ways time manifests in the world. Clock time is a domesticated human idea of time, but there are so many others…even for us. We sense the world in so many ways… so even the question of now is different for our eyes seeing a world of light and our nose taking it in through smell or our ears… I mean the now of a fart in smell and sound are not the same thing, never mind the duration of our embarrassment if we let one rip in public.

Host: Are you suggesting we measure time in farts?

Artist: No, of course not! I mean, yes it would be funny! But listen the universe is full of all of these different types of time. The time of the mosquito, the time of the mountain and the time of the galaxy, these are not the same thing and I don’t think it’s just a question of scale.
I want people to have more than one measure of time in their lives, not just one tool that helps them be on time for work but many tools… and some of those tools should help them understand their place in the cosmos. Numbers can only go so far to describe our lives.

Prof: I would say the same of language. Words can only go so far to help us find our place in the universe.

Can I address this previous comment about politics and science? I don’t think the idealism of science should be confused with neutrality. It is certain that clock time was always a political project. Scientists participated in the project of globalisation… developing standard systems to help coordinate and connect all of humanity. The project did not turn out quite like anyone expected. I humbly recognize we might have been somewhat naive, but our idealism and our desire to build a common world is needed more than ever. This is what is so exciting about what’s been happening in physics over the last century. That Einstein raised questions about our perceptual distinction between past, present and future or that today we continue to expand our understanding of the quantum world raising profound questions about the nature of reality. I agree with Rockwell here… we seemed to have lost our way. We do need something to help us understand our place in the cosmos, in the cycles of life that extend beyond our own and in the undetermined potential of the future.

Artist: Are you sure you are not a philosopher in a lab coat disguise?

Prof: Ha… no, the more I try to understand the world the more I am in awe of the universe.

Artist: I like that you are so unsettled. This is what I am looking for.

Prof: It comes with the job. Physics is rarely a settled thing. It has its own wildness. We argue. Every idea has to make their own way in the forest of facts.

Labour: This is what I worry about. While you two are off on a walk in the woods someone still has to mind the farm.

Host: [cutting in] — and that, I’m being told rather firmly in my ear, is where we have to leave it. We are, of all things, out of time. Professor, Mr. Stokowsky, Rockwell — thank you. We’ll see if Fabula Tempo can build something from all this. Goodnight.