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Art & Books

Time is on their side

At an IFOA panel yesterday, Christopher Dewdney facilitated a panel with three totally diverse writers talking about a subject that even the brainiest physicists haven’t completely conquered: time. Fortunately, Dewdney himself is obsessed with the topic, and his three authors were smart and engaging.

It’s always challenging to have a conversation about something many thinkers argue doesn’t even exist. Plainly, as humans we need it to. Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped, reminded us that time is the noun most often used in the English language.

Throughout, the conversation, she was able to quote the science and research designed to shed light on the topic. The most terrifying was the experiment in which people were asked to fall backwards off a building – they knew they’d be caught at the bottom – and to describe whether time slowed down. It did.

Soulful Norwegian author Kjersti A. Skomsvold, whose novel has the Einsteinian title The Faster I Walk The Smaller I Am, remarked that even if time does exist, “it doesn’t matter, because we’re all going to die. That’s why we write,” she said, “to hold onto time.”

Dewdney actually went around the table to find out how the authors defined time. Karen Thompson Walker, whose book The Age Of Miracles is about what happens when the earth’s rotation starts slowing down, commented that the whole subject is hard to control, kind of like life.

“That’s why I love writing,” she added, “because it’s one of the few things I can control.” She suggested that “Time is change.”

When the subject turned to issues related to relativity, Hammond suggested strategies for making time expand. Do new things, because that creates new memories. Pay attention to detail and you’ll get the feeling time is passing slowly. But when Skomsvold remarked that she can write for 14 hours and it will feel like five minutes, I felt compelled to question Hammond about what seemed like a paradox. Pay attention and time passes slowly, focus and times passes quickly. What gives?

“When you’re focussing, you’re actually outside of time,” she said.

Coincidentally, both Skomsvold and Hammond use the same quote from Albert Einstein for their books’ opening epigrams: The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

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