Have you ever woken in the middle of the night, looked at the clock, and noticed that it's the same time you woke up the night before - and the night before that? How does your body know what time it is? You're not sure but the passage of minutes makes you worry that if you don't get back to sleep, you'll be too tired in the morning to get your work done on time. You can't get back to sleep. The minutes are ticking. You feel the pressure of the clock bearing down on you.
How would “time” and our concept of it change for us if we didn’t always worry about its passage? Let's face it. Time matters because it ends. But what exactly is time? Is time the measured and constant tick of the clock from past to present to future? Or is time a state of mind that exists only as we perceive it in the "now?" If so, when exactly is "now?"
GUESTS:
- Alan Burdick- Staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation.
- Richard Muller- Professor Emeritus of Physics, UC Berkeley and the author of several books, most recently, Now: The Physics of Time
- Jonathan Berger- Composer, researcher, and Professor of Music in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He's currently a Rome Prize recipient at the American Academy in Rome and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow.
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Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired on February 2, 2017.