What Time Looks Like to Philip Glass
nautil.us
nautil.us
>FF: And that is exactly what the physicists tell us is happening.
>PG: Yes, but when I talk to my son Marlowe and he says the summer went by very fast, and in my childhood the summer went by really slow—what if it’s really true that time is actually speeding up? One can say, oh, you’re just imagining it; of course I’m imagining it, but what if it’s really happening? In other words, for the universe to keep expanding, maybe time has to go faster too, in order to keep up.
>FF: It certainly feels that way.
>PG: Many of us have that feeling. Yesterday I was 20. Where did all the years go? “How can it go by so fast,” we say. But what if time is actually speeding up? If everything is changing at the same speed, there is no way to measure it. The summer of 1947 went by very slowly for me, and this summer flew by for both Marlowe and me. What I suggest is that these are not subjective, but rather objective experiences. It’s also a little terrifying. What if 1,000 years from now, a life span felt like it was only a few days?
Such quackery. Why do people feel it's valid to come up with fantastical conjectures about physics with absolutely no reason to do so?
One of the greatest living artists talking about the subjectivity of perception and you refer to it as quackery.
It hurts my heart.
I used the term ‘scientism’ because the parent commenter is approaching the subject of science from a dogmatic, oppressive perspective. The entire oeuvre of someone like Jorge Luis Borges is predicated on a creative exploration and interpretation of science.
Scientism would also fit to describe trying to apply scientific criteria and norms where it's not required (or desirable). Like an impromptu creative conversation about what ifs...
It's called having an imagination and asking hypotheticals.
He didn't put out a paper on a physics journal saying that it is so.
In fact many scientists started exactly that way -- from asking wild hypothetical questions. Whether you pursue a specific validated answer is up to your job, Glass is not a physicist.
I guess people who never had a conversation over a shared bong can never understand this.
While I think the OP is being, perhaps, unfair to Glass, I think everyone is being unfair to the OP as well. There are people who believe the perception of time speeding up is objective, for the reasons Glass mentions. I'm not convinced these are Glass's original ideas. And while Glass may not be a physicist, nor is Jenny McCarthy a medical researcher. And yet people still listened to what she had to say to great harm. So I can certainly understand why someone, especially someone recently exposed to people who really believe this idea, might be concerned with someone famous espousing those ideas in the way Glass has done, even if I can't see any harm myself.
>I guess people who never had a conversation over a shared bong can never understand this.
Sure thing, duuuude. Now we're holding a published interview to the high (no pun intended) standard of "college stoners". Great.
Well,
1) Most published interviews are below the standard of "college stoners" (e.g. celebrity BS) -- so it would be a higher bar if we did so.
2) "College stoner" conversations are not that low in themselves. In fact many observations and discoveries by non-stoned people start with similar what ifs and digressions...
Yet, is it perhaps possible that we should consider carefully how far the credibility he so justly deserves should extend. Someone with minimal qualifications talks of how his subjective experience should be considered objective, and some opine that this should be taken seriously on the basis of unrelated merit.
It hurts my head.
There are philistines and people who only care about Justin Bieber, and their aesthetic opinions are not equally valid to someone who is an expert on Bach.
Of course that (culture) is a human construct, but so is physics and math. Animals don't have either, and the universe doesn't care either way.
"What I suggest is that these are not subjective, but rather objective experiences. It’s also a little terrifying. What if 1,000 years from now, a life span felt like it was only a few days?"
He's talking about the objectivity of perception.
https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/
All this fluff about a "major" scale and its "modes" when we could just say "2741" and derive other relationships from rotating bits and a few other simple relationships.
Everything else, like the "subjective feeling of a Persian Scale" is just quackery. It's just someone who doesn't understand numbers making up nonsense words.
You called out trivially refutable points of this interview. What I find more interesting is the connection (if any) between this disconnect from reality, and the genius of his music.
I've come to believe that there's a reason so many great creative artists are not "normal". If they were, they'd just do normal things and get normal jobs.
There's a big stack of effects that reached all the way from SR to perception.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with...
Psychologists have found that the subjective perception of the passing of time tends to speed up with increasing age in humans. This often causes people to increasingly underestimate a given interval of time as they age. This fact can likely be attributed to a variety of age-related changes in the aging brain, such as the lowering in dopaminergic levels with older age; however, the details are still being debated.[51][52][53] In an experimental study involving a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80, the participants' abilities to estimate 3 minutes of time were compared. The study found that an average of 3 minutes and 3 seconds passed when participants in the younger group estimated that 3 minutes had passed, whereas the older group's estimate for when 3 minutes had passed came after an average of 3 minutes and 40 seconds.
One day to an 11-year-old would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. This helps to explain why a random, ordinary day may therefore appear longer for a young child than an adult.
(Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 1)
PS: Which is a funny thing, since this is another article trending right now at HN: https://www.wired.com/story/these-physicists-watched-a-clock...
Also, "objective experience" is kind of a misnomer I suppose. Is "experience" inherently subjective?
Hell, actual physicists allow themselves to flirt with non-falsifiable ideas.
Regardless, I found it to be apt, and a better description than most of the changing experience of time as we age - and also, perhaps, as our culture changes as well.
Because people have inner lives and feelings and dreams and imaginations.
The explanations given by physics are not the be all end all for their needs.
If someone needs to service some kind of inner desire by making confused conjectures so be it, but let's not treat them like a sage for doing it.
Last year I had the immense privilege of attending a concert of perhaps the greatest piano virtuoso alive today. I was enthralled. Then after the concert finished, he expounded his views on why sound is a divine phenomenon, and that the wave theory of sound is a conspiracy peddled by scientists, easily disproven by simple experiments, as well as a confusing argument of why the sun revolves around the earth. Am I supposed to take this seriously because it's a, how do you put it, a creative view? I reiterate, nothing about my opinion of his performance changed due to this; those are entirely different concerns.
That doesn't mean we should accept it as factual of course (especially in cases where it is trivially untrue to people who are educated in the field) but it still has some interest to other creatives, etc. I don't think you're supposed to "take it seriously" i.e. consider it a genuine contender for an objective truth but instead think about how it may inform a creative process to believe in a world with different fundamental principles etc. Or at least that's how I interpret this kind of material.
But I tend to give everybody way too much credit and maybe this is being peddled as hack psuedoscience but hey, death of the author ;P
The current post title "What Time Looks Like to Philip Glass" is the web page title, though it's not the in-page heading on the article.
HN tends to gravitate towards these ideas in terms of conversation, even though much of the science aspect of 'what we do here' has or is being dealt with by a lot of people - enough that one can begin to be much more creative than say, a construction worker building a stage according to a predesignated specification, or a painter who has to make his/her paint from berries and leaves. Most discussions I've read here, most topics posted here - more often than not are extensions of this, having to do with hard science, physics, engineering, structure, building, designing, etc. Art is often only celebrated once it has achieved a certain degree of celebrity, or if it really ties into the hard science/engineering/business/systems side of things.
Kind of ironic(?) considering Paul Graham's essay:
http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Art is a process, as is experimentation. Mistakes will be made. They get corrected over time. It shouldn't matter who sees you make those mistakes as you do, but all of this is a consequence of 'groupthink' and feeling as though people are always watching you, judging every imperfection as though making errors are somehow detrimental to your entire functioning as a creative being. Errors teach, and as Bob Ross said, 'We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.'. That's a terrible philosophy when you have to calculate risk precisely, but not everything in life is about balancing risk.