The Infamous ‘Grandfather Paradox’ Doesn’t Make Time Travel Impossible After All

Robert Lea - 

Popular Mechanics

It just means you can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather.© Comstock - Getty Images

The grandfather paradox is a potential logical problem in which a time traveler could go back in time and erase their own existence.

Closed timelike curves, or paths through spacetime that lead to the past, allow time travel.

An MIT experiment suggests any jaunt that would lead to a paradox in time travel is canceled preemptively.

It’s a classic science fiction trope: a time traveler journeys back in time and causes a change in history that has disastrous effects on the present or even threatens their very existence.

If these changes jeopardize their ability to travel back through time in the first place, then surely the traveler can’t make that change to time, right? But then they can go back in time again, so, can make those changes again … and so forth.

That’s the essence of a trap called the “grandfather paradox,” an idea that has been used to great effect in books, films, and TV shows—from Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder to Futurama to Back to the Future. And as much fun as this concept is in science fiction, it’s also something that actual physicists and philosophers are intensely thinking about.

“The argument runs like this, if you could ‘go back in time’ then you could go back to a time before your grandfather had had any children and murder him,” Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of science who investigates the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic, explains to Popular Mechanics. “But if that happened, then one of your parents would not have been born, so you would not have been born, so there would be no you to go back in time. Contradiction.”

This problem arises from the risk time travel would present to one of the most preserved ideas in physics — causality, the idea that cause must proceed effect in all circumstances.

“The grandfather paradox is usually presented as a reductio ad absurdum, or a refutation of the proposition that time travel is possible,” Maudlin says. “So the hypothesis must be impossible because of the grandfather paradox; time travel— or reverse causation — is not possible.”

Though he doesn’t ultimately think travel backward through time is possible, Maudlin thinks that the grandfather paradox shouldn’t prevent time travel in and of itself. Instead, the paradox just prevents what actions can be conducted on a trip through time.

“The grandfather paradox does not prove that you can’t go back in time, just that you can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather,” he says. “There would be nothing logically wrong with going back in time and, say, saying ‘Hello’ to your grandfather.”

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have an idea of just how causality violation could be prevented.

Time Travel That Protects Granddad



Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a self-described “quantum mechanic,” has been conducting research for over a decade that suggests a way of going back in time and avoiding the grandfather paradox altogether.

This involves the physics of closed timelike curves (CTCs), paths through time and space that return to their starting point, which are allowed by general relativity — Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity and the effect mass has on space and time, or the single entity of spacetime.

“A closed timelike curve is a path through spacetime that leads to the past,” Loyd tells Popular Mechanics. “If you follow a closed timelike curve in your spaceship, you can end up interacting with your former self. That is, closed timelike curves allow time travel.”

There are a few different types of CTC models, which Lloyd illustrates with examples from popular fiction.

“There are basically two different possible types of models for CTCs. In one — which we call, imaginatively, Type I — the time traveler can intervene to change the past as she remembers it, at which point she enters into a different quantum branch of the universe— as in Back to the Future, Hot Tub Time Machine, and other time-travel narratives,” he explains. “In such Type I theories of time travel, it’s perfectly possible for the time traveler to kill her grandfather.”

In the other type of CTC model, which is predictably called Type II, time travel has to obey a principle of self-consistency. Sometimes called the Novikov self-consistency principle, or Niven’s Law of the conservation of history, this principle prevents causality violation by placing some events in order on the same CTC. This self-consistency would prevent our time-traveler from landing her machine on granddad, even if she wanted to. Some effect would always divert her course.

“In Type II theories, the time traveler cannot change the past, no matter how hard she tries,” Lloyd says. “Examples of Type II time travel narratives include Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the Terry Gilliam film, Twelve Monkeys.”

Terminator Photons: Back in Time With a Mission to Kill

Lloyd and his team set about exploring a version of Type II CTCs that combine the concepts of quantum teleportation with post-selection — the factor in a computation that allows certain results to be accepted while others are rejected.

“Quantum teleportation is a process in which a quantum system dematerializes here and then rematerializes somewhere else based on the counter-intuitive quantum phenomenon of entanglement [the idea that two or more particles can be linked in such a way that a change in one instantaneously causes a change in the other no matter how distant they are],” Lloyd says. “In the quantum theory of CTCs that we developed, travel through the closed timelike curve is closely related to teleportation.”

The quantum mechanic added that adding post-selection to quantum measurement makes the process deterministic rather than probabilistic and it effectively bans events that would prove to be paradoxical.

Lloyd set about testing this idea by developing an “in principle” time machine — a quantum simulation that effectively sends a photon a few billionths of a second backward in time to have it attempt to “kill” its previous self.

The results showed that the closer a photon got to doing something self-inconsistent, the more frequently the experiment failed. Lloyd’s results could hint that time travel might work in the same way — any jaunt that would lead to a paradox is canceled preemptively.

Could Quantum Physics Provide an Exit to the Grandfather Paradox?

Quantum physics might provide another out to the Grandfather Paradox. One particular interpretation of quantum mechanics — Hugh Everett’s Many World Interpretations — suggests that for every quantum possibility that exists, a separate and distinct world emerges.

Physicist David Deutsch, a pioneer in quantum computing, imagined the Many Worlds idea in the case of time travel. He envisioned a particle traveling along a CTC loop through time in a quantum superposition— a phenomenon that exists in quantum physics that allows a system to exist in multiple, potentially contradictory, states at once.

To avoid paradoxes at the end of the journey and ensure a particle arrives back at its starting point the same as it was when it left, a world is created for each possible state. Let’s see how that would work for a human traveler in time if such a thing was possible.

Imagine a hypothetical time traveler, who we’ll call Susan, takes a CTC-based journey back through time to meet her grandfather as a child in 1963. Being hyper-literal and overprecise, she lands this time machine exactly where granddad was standing in Totter’s Lane scrapyard, London, squishing him dead. Susan waits to disappear from existence, but the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics may protect her.

This is because when Susan arrived in 1963, she created a world that is distinct from the world she left. In the world she left, let’s call it Earth 1, her grandfather wasn’t squashed. He went on to have a granddaughter called Susan who once disappeared in a time machine. So, the child Susan landed on in the past isn’t her grandfather at all, just a version of him from an alternative world.

Traveling back to the future, Susan would find it different from the world she left—not because it’s been altered by her actions, but rather because this world, Earth 2, was created by her — it’s not the same world.

The Many Worlds Interpretation has a consequence for our time traveler; Everett insisted that one of the rules of his theorems was that worlds couldn’t interfere with each other. This means that our time traveler can’t get back to Earth 1.

If Susan attempts to travel back in time to 1963 to prevent the death of her grandfather, she creates a third world — Earth 3 — in which two time-travelers appeared in Totter’s Lane scrapyard in 1963. She travels forward again realizing she now can’t get back to Earth 1 or Earth 2.

Somewhere on Earth 1 and in that timeline, Susan’s wistful grandfather awaits her return, which will never come about.

Of course, the Grandfather Paradox isn’t the only argument against time travel. One very sensible question is: if time travel is possible, when are all the time travelers?

“For what it’s worth since we put forward the theory and performed the proof of principle experiment, many people have written to me claiming to be time travelers who are stuck in time and asking me if they can use our time machine to get back to their own time,” Lloyd says. “I advise them to wait until the bugs have been worked out.”

The Tyranny Of Time

The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.

Marcos Guinoza for Noema Magazine

BY JOE ZADEH

JUNE 3, 2021

Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle.

On a damp and cloudy afternoon on February 15, 1894, a man walked through Greenwich Park in East London. His name was Martial Bourdin — French, 26 years of age, with slicked-back dark hair and a mustache. He wandered up the zigzagged path that led to the Royal Observatory, which just 10 years earlier had been established as the symbolic and scientific center of globally standardized clock time — Greenwich Mean Time — as well as the British Empire. In his left hand, Bourdin carried a bomb: a brown paper bag containing a metal case full of explosives. As he got closer to his target, he primed it with a bottle of sulfuric acid. But then, as he stood facing the Observatory, it exploded in his hands.

The detonation was sharp enough to get the attention of two workers inside. Rushing out, they saw a park warden and some schoolboys running towards a crouched figure on the ground. Bourdin was moaning and screaming, his legs were shattered, one arm was blown off and there was a hole in his stomach. He said nothing about his identity or his motives as he was carried to a nearby hospital, where he died 30 minutes later.

Nobody knows for sure what Bourdin was trying to do that day. An investigation showed that he was closely linked to anarchist groups. Numerous theories circulated: that he was testing the bomb in the park for a future attack on a public place or was delivering it to someone else. But because he had primed the device and was walking the zigzagged path, many people — including the Home Office explosives expert, Vivian Dering Majendie, and the novelist Joseph Conrad, who loosely based his book “The Secret Agent” on the event — suspected that Bourdin had wanted to attack the Observatory.

Bourdin, so the story goes, was trying to bomb clock time, as a symbolic revolutionary act or under a naive pretense that it may actually disrupt the global measurement of time. He wasn’t the only one to attack clocks during this period: In Paris, rebels simultaneously destroyed public clocks across the city, and in Bombay, protestors shattered the famous Crawford Market clock with gunfire.

Around the world, people were angry about time.

The destruction of clocks seems outlandish now. Contemporary society is obsessed with time — it is the most used noun in the English language. Since clocks with dials and hands first appeared on church towers and town halls, we have been bringing them closer toward us: into our workplaces and schools, our homes, onto our wrists and finally into the phone, laptop and television screens that we stare at for hours each day.

We discipline our lives by the time on the clock. Our working lives and wages are determined by it, and often our “free time” is rigidly managed by it too. Broadly speaking, even our bodily functions are regulated by the clock: We usually eat our meals at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are hungry, go to sleep at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are tired and attribute more significance to the arresting tones of a clock alarm than the apparent rising of the sun at the center of our solar system. The fact that there is a strange shame in eating lunch before noon is a testament to the ways in which we have internalized the logic of the clock. We are “time-binding” animals, as the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin put it in his 1987 book, “Time Wars.” “All of our perceptions of self and world are mediated by the way we imagine, explain, use and implement time.”

“The clock does not measure time; it produces it.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have reported that their experience of time has become warped and weird. Being trapped at home or laboring unusually excessive hours makes days feel like hours and hours like minutes, while some months feel endless and others pass almost without notice. It seems the time in our clocks and the time in our minds have drifted apart.

Academic studies have explored how our emotions (such as pandemic-induced grief and anxiety) could be distorting our perception of time. Or maybe it is just because we aren’t moving around and experiencing much change. After all, time is change, as Aristotle thought — what is changeless is timeless. But rarely does the clock itself come into question — the very thing we use to measure time, the drumbeat against which we define “weird” distortions. The clock continues to log its rigid seconds, minutes and hours, utterly unaware of the global crisis that is taking place. It is stable, correct, neutral and absolute.

But what makes us wrong and the clock right? “For most people, the last class they had devoted to clocks and time was early in primary school,” Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York who has been studying clocks for more than 30 years, told me recently. “There’s this thing that is central to our entire society, that’s built into all of our electronics. And we’re wandering around with an early primary school level of knowledge about it.”

Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth wrote in his book “Objects of Time.” That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on.

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of “hours” or “weeks” do not matter. Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans.

During an era in which social constructs like race, gender and sexuality are being challenged and dismantled, the true nature of clock time has somehow escaped the attention of wider society. Like money, the clock has come to be seen as the thing it was only supposed to represent: The clock has become time itself.

Clock time is not what most people think it is. It is not a transparent reflection of some sort of true and absolute time that scientists are monitoring. It was created, and it is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes. Daylight savings, for instance, is an arbitrary thing we made up. So is the seven-day week. “People tend to think that somewhere there is some master clock, like the rod of platinum in the Bureau of Weights and Measures, that is the ‘uber clock,’” Birth told me. “There isn’t. It’s calculated. There is no clock on Earth that gives the correct time.”

What’s usually taught in Western schools is that the time in our clocks (and by extension, our calendars) is determined by the rotation of the Earth, and thus the movement of the sun across our sky. The Earth, we learn, completes an orbit of the sun in 365 days, which determines the length of our year, and it rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, which determines our day. Thus, an hour is 1/24 of this rotation, a minute is 1/60 of an hour and a second is 1/60 of a minute.

None of this is true. The Earth is not a perfect sphere with perfect movement; it’s a lumpy round mass that is squashed at both poles and wobbles. It does not rotate in exactly 24 hours each day or orbit the sun in exactly 365 days each year. It just kinda does. Perfection is a manmade concept; nature is irregular.

For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time. One of the most common early timekeeping devices, sundials (or shadow clocks), reflected this: The hours of the day were not of fixed 60-minute lengths, but variable. Hours were longer or shorter as they waxed and waned in accordance with the Earth’s orbit, making the days feel shorter in the winter and longer in the summer. These clocks didn’t determine the hours, minutes and seconds themselves, they simply mirrored their surrounding environment and told you where you were within the cyclical rhythms of nature.

But since the 14th century, we’ve gradually been turning our backs on nature and calculating our sense of time via manmade devices. It began in the monasteries of Northern and Central Europe, where pious monks built crude iron objects that unreliably but automatically struck intervals to help bellringers keep track of canonical hours of prayer. Like any machine, the logic of the mechanical clock was based upon regularity, the rigid ticking of an escapement. It brought with it a whole different way to view time, not as a rhythm determined by a combination of various observed natural phenomena, but as a homogenous series of perfectly identical intervals provided by one source.

The religious fervor for rationing time and disciplining one’s life around it led the American historian Lewis Mumford to describe the Benedictine monks as “perhaps the original founders of modern capitalism.” It is one of the great ironies of Christianity that it set the wheels in motion for an ever-unfolding mania of scientific accuracy and precision around timekeeping that would eventually secularize time in the West and divorce God, the original clockmaker, from the picture entirely.

“The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.”

By 1656, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens had invented the first pendulum clock, which delivered homogenous and regular slices of a small unit of time: seconds. Unlike the inconsistent mechanical clocks of before, the clock time of pendulums was nearly perfect. In that same century, the British astronomer John Flamsteed and others developed “mean time,” an average calculation of the Earth’s rotation. Science had found a way around the Earth’s wobbly eccentricities, producing a quantifiable and consistent unit that became known as Greenwich Mean Time.

Standardized time became vital for seafarers and irresistible to corporate interests, such was the ease it could offer trade, transport and electric communication. But it took longer to colonize the minds of the general public. During the British “railway mania” of the 1840s, around 6,000 miles of railway lines were constructed across the country. Investors (including Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and the Brontë sisters) climbed over each other to acquire rail company shares in a frenzy of freewheeling capitalism that caused one of the biggest economic bubbles in British history. Companies like Great Western Railway and Midland Railway began to enforce Greenwich Mean Time inside their stations and on their trains to make timetables run efficiently.

Every city, town and village in Britain used to set its clocks to its own local solar time, which gave each locale a palpable sense of identity, time and place. If you lived in Newcastle, noon was when the sun was highest, no matter what the time in London was. But as the railways brought standardized timetables, local times were demonized and swept aside. By 1855, nearly all public clocks were set to GMT, or “London time,” and the country became one time zone.

The rebellious city of Bristol was one of the last to agree to standardized time: The main town clock on the Corn Exchange building kept a third hand to denote “Bristol time” for the local population who refused to adjust. It remains there to this day.

“Railway time” arrived in America too, splitting the country into four distinct time zones and causing protests to flare nationwide. The Boston Evening Transcript demanded, “Let us keep our own noon,” and The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette wrote, “Let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon and stars.”

The 1884 International Meridian Conference is often framed as the moment clock time took over the world. The globe was sliced into 24 time zones declaring different clock times, all synchronized to the time of the most powerful empire, the British and their GMT. Nobody would decipher time from nature anymore — they would be told what time it was by a central authority. The author Clark Blaise has argued that once this was implemented, “It didn’t matter what the sun proclaimed at all. ‘Natural time’ was dead.”

“Clock time is not what most people think it is. It was created, and it is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes.”

In reality, this process had already been taking place throughout the 1800s as a result of European colonialism, imperialism and oppression. Colonialism was not just a conquest of land, and therefore space, but also a conquest of time. From South Asia to Africa to Oceania, imperialists assaulted alternative forms of timekeeping. They saw any region without European-style clocks, watches and church bells as a land without time.

“European global expansion in commerce, transport and communication was paralleled by, and premised upon, control over the manner in which societies abroad related to time,” the Australian historian Giordano Nanni wrote in his book, “The Colonization of Time.” “The project to incorporate the globe within a matrix of hours, minutes and seconds demands recognition as one of the most significant manifestations of Europe’s universalizing will.” In short, if the East India Company was the physical embodiment of British colonialism overseas, GMT was the metaphysical embodiment.

The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures. When British colonizers swept into southeastern Australia in search of gold, they depicted the timekeeping practices of the Indigenous societies they encountered as irregular and unpredictable in contrast to the rational and linear nature of the clock. This was despite the fact that Indigenous societies in the region had advanced forms of timekeeping based on the moon, stars, rains, the blossoming of certain trees and shrubs and the flowing of tides, which they used to determine the availability of food and resources, distance and calendar dates.

“Nineteenth-century Europeans generally conceived of such closeness to nature as calling into question the very humanity of those who practiced it,” Nanni wrote. “This was partly determined by the fact that Enlightenment values and ideals had come to associate the idea of ‘humanness’ with man’s transcendence and domination over nature; and its corresponding opposite — savagery — as a mode of life that existed ‘closer to nature.’”

In Melbourne, churches and railway stations grew quickly on the horizon, bringing with them the hands, faces, bells and general cacophony of clock time. By 1861, a time ball was installed in the Williamstown Lighthouse and Melbourne was officially synchronized to Greenwich Mean Time. British colonizers attempted to integrate Indigenous peoples into their labor force with unsatisfactory results due to their unwillingness to sacrifice their own form of timekeeping. They did not believe in “meaningless toil” and “obedience to the clock,” wrote the Australian sociologist Mike Donaldson. “To them, time was not a tyrant.”

In some parts of Australia, the Indigenous resistance to Western clock time continued defiantly. In 1977, in the tiny town of Pukatja (then known as Ernabella) a giant, revolving, electronically operated clock was constructed near the town center for the local Pitjantjatjara people to coordinate their lives around. A decade later, a white construction worker at a town council meeting noted that the clock had been broken for months. Nobody had noticed, because nobody looked at it.

“Nineteenth-century Europeans generally conceived of such closeness to nature as calling into question the very humanity of those who practiced it.”

— Giordano Nanni

The movement toward standardized time reached its apex in the 1950s, when atomic clocks were judged to be better timekeepers than the Earth itself. The second, as a unit of time, was redefined not as a fraction of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, but as a specific number of oscillations of cesium atoms inside an atomic clock.

“When you look at precision timekeeping, it’s all about insulating and isolating these clocks from responding to anything that goes on around them,” Bastian told me via a video call from her home in Edinburgh. A poster with the words “A clock that falls asleep” hung on the wall behind her. “You have to keep them separate from temperature, fluctuations, humidity, even quantum gravity effects. They can’t respond to anything.”

Over 400 atomic clocks in laboratories around the world count time using the atomic second as their standard. A weighted average of these times is used to create International Atomic Time, which forms the basis of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC isn’t completely non-responsive. Every few years, a leap second is added to it to keep it reasonably close to the rotations of the Earth. But in 2023, at the World Radiocommunication Conference, nations from around the world will discuss whether it is in our best interest to abolish leap seconds and permanently unmoor ourselves from the sun and moon in favor of time we manufacture ourselves.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to imagine is what capitalism has done to our perception of time via clocks. It now seems embedded into our very psychology to view time as a commodity that can be spent or wasted.

Capitalism did not create clock time or vice versa, but the scientific and religious division of time into identical units established a useful infrastructure for capitalism to coordinate the exploitation and conversion of bodies, labor and goods into value. Clock time, the British sociologist Barbara Adam has argued, connected time to money. “Time could become commodified, compressed and controlled,” she wrote in her book “Time.” “These economic practices could then be globalized and imposed as the norm the world over.”

Clock time, Adam goes on, is often “taken to be not only our natural experience of time” but “the ethical measure of our very existence.” Even the most natural of processes now must be expressed in clock time in order for them to be validated.

Women in particular often find themselves at the wrong end of this arbitrary metric. Unpaid labor such as housework and childcare — which still disproportionately burdens women — seems to slip between the measurements of the clock, whereas the experience of pregnancy is very much under the scrutiny of clock time. Adam quotes a woman’s account of her birth-giving experience: “The woman in labor, forced by the intensity of the contractions to turn all her attention to them, loses her ordinary, intimate contact with clock time.” But in the hospital environment, where the natural process of childbirth has been evaluated and standardized in clock-time units, a woman is pressured to follow what Alys Einion-Waller, a professor of midwifery at Swansea University, has called a “medicalized birth script.”

“It now seems embedded into our very psychology to view time as a commodity that can be spent or wasted.”

The firsthand experience and intuition of a woman giving birth is devalued in favor of timings and measurements related to the expected length of labor stages, the spacing of contractions, the progress of cervical dilation and other observations. Language such as “failure to progress” is common when a woman doesn’t perform to the expected curve, and diversion from the clock-time framework can be used to justify medical intervention. This is one of the reasons that the home-birthing movement has recently grown in popularity.

Likewise, new parents know that the baby itself becomes their clock, and any semblance of standardized time is preposterous. But in time, of course, the baby joins the rigid temporal hierarchy of school, with non-negotiable class and mealtimes, forcing biological rhythms to adhere to socially acceptable clock time.

As Birth put it to me: “The clock helps us with things that are uniform in duration. But anything that is not uniform, anything that varies, the clock screws up. … When you try to schedule a natural process, nature doesn’t cooperate.”

In 2002, scientists watched in amazement as Larsen B, an ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula 55 times bigger than Manhattan — which had been stable for 10,000 years — splintered and collapsed into hundreds of shards the size of skyscrapers. A glaciologist who flew overhead told Scientific American that he could see whales swimming in water where ice a thousand feet thick had been just days earlier.

Virtually overnight, previous clock-time predictions around the mass loss of ice needed to be rewritten to acknowledge a 300% acceleration in the rate of change. In 2017, a piece of the nearby Larsen C ice shelf fell off, creating the world’s biggest iceberg — so big that maps had to be redrawn. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls such abrupt events, which happen more often than you might think, “surprises.”

The climate crisis is a realm in which linear clock time frequently and fatally misfires. It frames the crisis as something that is measurable, quantifiable and predictable — something we can envisage in the same way as work hours, holidays, chores and projects. Warming temperatures, ocean acidification, ice melting and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are constantly being translated into clock time to create tipping points, thresholds, roadmaps and sustainable development goals for us to beat or aspire to. When a “surprise” happens, time estimates crumble in the face of reality. Nature doesn’t cooperate.

It works the same way for putting limits on the amount of time we have to stop global warming. The Guardian launched a blog called “100 months to save the world” in July 2008 that used scientific research and predictions to make it “possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a tipping point.” That was 154 months ago. Are we 54 months into the end of the world? Perhaps. But one can’t help but wonder if the constant framing of the climate crisis in clock time deadlines, which then pass without comment, has contributed to the inability and inertia of many to comprehend the seriousness of what is actually happening.

“It’s a privilege to live by clock time alone and ignore nature’s urgent temporalities.”

“We can’t say that clock time isn’t important,” Vijay Kolinjivadi, a researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy, told me. “There’s certain times when that metric makes a lot of sense, and we should use it. For instance, you and I decided to talk at 10 a.m. There’s no way to escape that. But when we are thinking about capitalism, social crisis and ecological breakdown, it gets problematic.” Clock time, he went on, “is always geared toward production, growth and all the things that created this ecological crisis in the first place.”

One of the most affecting myths of clock time is that we all experience time at the same steady pace. We don’t. “The future is already here,” the science-fiction author William Gibson famously said in 2003, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And framing the climate crisis as a ticking clock with only a certain amount of time “to avoid disaster” ignores those for whom disaster has already arrived. The reality is that it’s a privilege to live by clock time alone and ignore nature’s urgent temporalities.

Every few years, the American Midwest is ravaged by floods as the Missouri River swells from intense rainfall, upending the lives of millions. When the floods came during the summer of 1993, a New York Times journalist interviewed a resident about the night he was evacuated. “He remembers everything about the night the river forced him and his wife out of the house where they had lived for 27 years — except for this. ‘I can’t tell you what day it was. … All I can tell you is that the river stage was 26 [feet] when we left.’” The headline of the article was, “They Measure Time by Feet.”

In 1992, the astrophysicist turned author Alan Lightman published a novel called “Einstein’s Dreams” in which he fictionalizes a young Albert Einstein dreaming about the multitude of ways that different interpretations of time would play out in the lives of those around him. In one dream, Einstein sees a world where time is not measured — there are “no clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time. A house is begun when stone and lumber arrive at the building site. The stone quarry delivers stone when the quarryman needs money. … Trains leave the station at the Bahnhofplatz when the cars are filled with passengers.” In another, time is measured, but by “the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness.”

Recently, there have been many attempts in both art and literature to reimagine the clock and the role it plays in our lives. At the end of 2020, the artist David Horvitz exhibited a selection of clocks he had created, which included one that was synchronized to a heartbeat. Another artist, Scott Thrift, has developed a clock called “Today,” which simplifies the passage of time into dawn, noon, dusk and midnight as opposed to seconds, minutes and hours. It moves at half the speed of a regular clock, making one full rotation in a day.

Bastian herself has proposed clocks that are more responsive to the temporalities of the climate crisis, like a clock synchronized with the population levels of endangered sea turtles, an animal that has lived in the Pacific Ocean for 150 million years but now faces extinction due to temperature changes. These and other proposals all have the same idea at their core: There are more ways to arrange and synchronize ourselves with the world around us than the abstract clock time we hold so dear.

“They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.”

— Alan Lightman

Clock time may have colonized the planet, but it did not completely destroy alternative traditions of timekeeping. Certain religions maintain a connection to time that is rooted in nature, like salat in Islam and zmanim in Judaism, in which prayer times are defined by natural phenomena like dawn, dusk and the positioning of stars. The timing of these events may be converted into clock time, but they are not determined by clocks.

In places where globally standardized time is enforced, some still rebel, like in China, where the entire country is under one time zone, BST (Beijing Standard Time). In Xinjiang, nearly 2,000 miles west of Beijing, where the sun sometimes sets at midnight according to BST, many Uighur communities use their own form of local solar time.

And Indigenous communities around the world still use ecological calendars, which keep time through observations of seasonal changes. Native American tribes around Lake Oneida, for example, recognize a certain flower blooming as the time to start plowing and setting traps for animals emerging from hibernation. As opposed to a standardized clock and calendar format, these ecological calendars, by their very nature, reflect and respond to an ever-changing climate.

In one of the last dreams in Lightman’s book, Einstein imagines a world not too dissimilar from our own, where one “Great Clock” determines the time for everyone. Every day, tens of thousands of people line up outside the “Temple of Time” where the Great Clock resides, waiting their turn to enter and bow before it. “They stand quietly,” wrote Lightman, “but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured. They must watch the precise passage of minutes and decades. They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.

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SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for TIME 

Now Time Travel Can Be Paradox-Free, 

Thanks To Math 
Elizabeth Fernandez Contributor Science FORBES
I write about the philosophy and ethics of science and technology.

Time travelers might not have to worry about creating a world where their parents never met. GETTY

It’s a worry of time travelers everywhere. What if they go back in time and do something terrible, like prevent their parents from meeting or killing their grandfather? Such a time-traveling “oops” could prevent them from ever being born. Therefore, they would have never existed to travel back in time in the first place.

This “grandfather paradox” has had want-to-be time travelers scratching their heads ever since we dreamed of traveling back in time. Does this mean that time travel is not possible? Does it mean that each decision we make creates several different branching worlds? This conundrum may have been cleared up (at least mathematically) by fourth-year undergraduate student Germain Tobar of the University of Queensland.

Irish artist Emmalene Blake's mural of characters Marty McFly and Doc Brown from the cult 80's movie 'Back to the Future' in South Dublin. (Photo by Brian Lawless/PA Images via Getty Images)

 PA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES


Time Travel and Philosophy

One way to solve the grandfather paradox? Time travel isn’t possible at all.

This is probably the easiest, yet least fulfilling, of potential solutions. Time travel isn’t possible, let’s wash our hands of any possibility and forget about it. And this very well may be the case.

However, in general relativity, things called closed time-like curves can exist, and are a way to solve general field equations. It’s like stepping on a train, taking a wonderful trip through the mountains, and returning to the same spot you left off, both in space and in time. That means the moment where you step off the train is both in the past and future of when you got on the train in the first place. In a closed time-like curve, an object returns to the same place and time that it was in the past, completing a loop. It’s unclear if closed time-like curves exist in our universe, but if they do, mathematically, they would allow for time travel.

The moment you step onto the train is both in the past and the future of the moment you step off in a closed time-like curve.

 GETTY

Then there’s option two. In this quantum mechanical model, each choice opens up another universe. If time travelers changed something in the past, they would enter another parallel universe. The original timeline would still exist, one among many branching worlds. In such a model, it might be very hard for time travelers to return to the universe they came from.

Finally - time travel is possible, but time travelers can only do certain things. A time traveler who went back in time, for example, could not kill Hitler, no matter what he tried. This raises all sorts of philosophical problems - does the time traveler still have free will? It’s difficult to say time travel is possible while simultaneously destroying freedom of choice.


Paradox-Free Time Travel While Preserving Freedom of Choice

That’s where young physicist Germain Tobar steps in.

Under the supervision of physicist Dr. Fabio Costa, Tobar came up with a way to mathematically preserve freedom of choice, while allowing for paradox-free time travel.

For example, let’s imagine there is a scientist in a laboratory with a time-traveling coin. The coin enters the laboratory at some point in the past as “heads” and leaves at some point in the future as “tails”. Tobar’s model fixes the boundary conditions - the point in time where the coin enters and leaves the laboratory - as always heads and tails. Then, his model allows the state of the coin to change when it is in the laboratory. Since the initial and final state of the coin is fixed, a paradox is avoided. However, anything can happen to the coin when it is in the laboratory. “For example,” says Tobar, “she [the scientist] can decide to always flip the coin, or always prepare heads regardless of what she got... it can flip, it can hit other coins, and so on.” But no matter what she did or how hard she tried, each time the coin time-travels through her lab, it will always leave as “tails”.

Let’s take another pertinent example. “Say you traveled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus,” Costa says. “However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected – that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place.”

In Tobar’s model, no matter what you did, the virus would still escape somehow. “You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” says Tobar. “No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you.”

Even time travelers couldn't stop the spread of the coronavirus. GETTY

That means that you have complete freedom of choice, but no matter how hard you tried, you could not stop COVID-19 from escaping.

But this is good news for Marty McFly in Back to the Future. Nothing he did could prevent his parents from falling in love and getting married, and eventually, allowing Marty to be born. Other things might change, like how they met, or what his father ate for breakfast that morning. But nothing could change their eventual meeting.

This doesn’t necessarily rule out other models of time travel, for example, a quantum mechanical one. “Some of the quantum approaches would indeed invoke the existence of multiple universes, which interact through the time machine, possibly creating alternate timelines,” says Tobar. Instead, Tobar and Costa’s model is classical and shows that if only one universe exists, it is possible to allow for paradox-free time travel.

This work has other implications as well, including the unification of quantum theory with general relativity. “One of the main issues is that, in such a theory, time seems to disappear, making the traditional, temporal view of dynamics unsuitable,” says Tobar. “Our work presents a different way to look at physical laws, which could find applications in theories of quantum gravity.”

Could closed time-like curves, and potentially time machines, exist in our Universe?

“Proposals so far involve exotic matter (with negative or infinite energy), and we don't know if such matter exists in our universe,” says Tobar. “An interesting consequence is that the CTCs [closed time-like curves] would only exist after a certain point in time, which means it would not be possible to time travel to before the first time machine was created. This would explain why we haven't seen any time traveler from the future yet.”

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website. 

Elizabeth Fernandez
Dr. Elizabeth Fernandez is the host of SparkDialog Podcasts (sparkdialog.com), which covers the intersection of science and society. She has a PhD in astrophysics 

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TYRANT TIME

Experts urge Congress to switch country to daylight saving time permanently

By Annie Klingenberg, Medill News Service


The debate over whether to make daylight saving time permanent reached a House subcommittee this week. 

Photo by Garonzi Stefania/Wikimedia Commons


WASHINGTON, March 10 (UPI) -- As Americans prepare to switch their clocks forward Sunday, members of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee and a variety of experts agreed it's time for the country to stop switching times.

But they couldn't agree on which time to keep -- daylight saving time or standard Time.

"None of us can change how much sunlight there is in a given day. ... Congress does not have the power to change time; Congress has the power to balance time," National Association of Convenience Stores lobbyist Lyle Beckwith said at a hearing Wednesday.

He argued for the unpopular opinion among Americans of maintaining the status quo of making the time switch twice a year.

RELATED Daylight Saving Time: brighter mornings, darker afternoons

A November 2021 YouGovAmerica Poll found that 63% of Americans want to eliminate the practice of changing clocks twice a year to account for daylight saving time, which was adopted to preserve energy during World War II.

Steve Callandrillo, a law professor who has researched the costs of changing to daylight saving time, testified before the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee that while saving energy "was the original justification for daylight saving time, it's no longer as strong as it used to be, but it still does save energy."

But the energy saved is relatively small. According to a 2008 study by the Department of Energy, "the total electricity savings of extended daylight saving time was about 1.3 terawatt-hour. That corresponds to ... 0.03% of electricity consumption over the year."

RELATED 'Fall back' time change potentially bad for health, experts say

Another argument from the witnesses for ending the switching between times was the harm it has on physical and mental health.

"Permanent standard time maximizes sunlight in the winter mornings when we need abundant light to wake up and become alert and minimizes sunlight late into the summer evenings when too much light can work against our sleep," said Dr. Beth Malow, director of the sleep division at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., acknowledged that the transition for phones and other devices might be easy, but "it is not so much for our bodies."

RELATED Sleep experts: It's time to ditch daylight saving time

Lawmakers touted choosing daylight saving time as the permanent time, pointing to the economic benefits of having the extra hour of sunlight in the afternoon or early evening.

"That the extra hour of sunshine in the evening can be beneficial, a real boom to restaurants, commercial commerce and tourism," said subcommittee Chair Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.

Beckwith, representing convenience stores, cited a study conducted by JP Morgan Chase & Co. that compared credit card spending in Los Angeles, a city that observes daylight saving time, and Phoenix, a city that does not.

The study found that credit card spending increased in Los Angeles at the onset of daylight saving time decreased at the end of it relative to spending in Phoenix.

"When the clocks change in the spring, people feel as though they have more time after work to engage in a range of activities that increase commerce, from eating out to shopping," he said.

Lawmakers from both parties have introduced bills in the House related to time changes. Two bills would make daylight saving time permanent, and two others would give states the option to observe it year-round.

No bills have been introduced this session that would make standard time permanent.

It’s time to ‘spring forward’ this weekend in most of the US & CANADA



People in parts of the United States that observe daylight saving time will set their clocks ahead this weekend as the country switches from standard time. (AP Graphic)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even though winter doesn’t slip away until next weekend, time has its marching orders. In the United States, it’s time to “spring” forward.

Daylight saving time announces its entrance at 2 a.m. local time Sunday for most of the country. Standard time hibernates until Nov. 6. It will stay lighter for longer into the evening but the sun will rise later in the morning than it has during the months of standard time.

Remember to set clocks an hour ahead, usually before bed Saturday night.

No time change is observed in Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

A poll conducted last October shows that most Americans want to avoid switching between daylight saving and standard time, though there is no consensus behind which should be used all year.

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only 25% of Americans said they preferred to switch back and forth between standard and daylight saving time.

Forty-three percent of Americans said they would like to see standard time used during the entire year. Thirty-two percent say they would prefer that daylight saving time be used all year.

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,083 adults was conducted Oct. 21-25 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

SEE

 Tick, Tock, We Live By The Clock

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

The creation of the clock is a defining moment in the history of capitalism. It allowed for the regimintation of work, and for the development of industrialization as clock works were applied to steam power.

The proletariat was created to work by the time of the clock. Prior to that the artisan and farmer who worked by hours of daylight. With the advent of the factory system in the late 18th Century, workers could be forced to work in the darkness with the help of kerosene lamps, and by the use of clocks to tell the time of the working day. Literally the working day as we know it today began back then. (EP Thompson, Past and Present (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism )

For generations, there has been no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752. At the trial of Henry Hunt and others for treason in 1820, James Scarlett, the prosecuting counsel, had this to say:
The ridiculous folly of a mob had been exemplified in a most humorous manner by that eminent painter, Mr. Hogarth. It was found necessary many years ago, in order to prevent a confusion in the reckoning of time, to knock eleven days out of the calendar, and it was supposed by ignorant persons that the legislature had actually deprived them of eleven days of their existence. This ridiculous idea was finely exposed in Mr. Hogarth's picture, where the mob were painted throwing up their hats, and crying out "Give us back our eleven days". Thus it was at the present time; that many individuals, who could not distinguish words from things, were making an outcry for that of which they could not well explain the nature. 'Give us our eleven days!': calendar reform in eighteenth-century England

The time of the clock is the historical moment when capitalism begins to supercede fuedalism. Clockworks were literally the mechanization of feudal society, hinting at the capitalism time to come. A vision of the future workers of Gothic Capitalism were first introduced with the creation of mechanical men, automatons, in the 17th century. As described in the Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach. They would presage the future proletariat of the machine age of the factories of the late 19th and early 20th century, where workers would become cogs in the machine.

But in the history of “clocks and culture” what is new in the development of Western horology is the application of mechanics in a system of economic production. Prior to their remarkable development in the course of the Renaissance, clocks were products of art and science.More than coincidence, a causal relationship can be seen in the invention of the mechanical clock in the period of early capitalism. The Renaissance Discovery of Time.

With the advent of further mechinization of work in the 20th Century skilled craft work was abolished in favour of the factory where work could be proportioned according to units of time, as developed by Fredrick Taylor. Hence the famous phrase 'Time is money" has been the essence of capitalism since the its inception with the development of the first mechanical clocks.

Representations of Capital interconnect with representations of space and time. E.P. Thompson, in his famous essay on the "Industrialization of Clock Time," showed how the transition from peasantry to wage labor -- from a feudal economy to a capitalist society -- entailed dramatic changes in the experience of time. Clock time was essential if industrialists were to measure output per a generalizable unit of labor. The capitalist organization of work made hours the constant variable needed to measure work and wages.

Today, the relationship between clock time and Capital is cast in terms of Investors. In this Fidelity ad, where the images are choreographed to the fast-paced rock pulse of the Rolling Stone's song, "Time," the focus is on the consumer or the retail investor who races against time.

As Marx observed, workers formally exchanged their labor-time for a wage -- hence the requirement for punching a time clock. Today, we still recognize the relative freedom offered by professionalized occupations where one sells a product or a service (rather than the hours that went into making it) -- the distinction between a salary and a wage

MAPPING GLOBAL CAPITAL

To this day native peoples who do not live in industrialized society do not live by the tyranny of the clock, which is why you will find in farmer and artisan cultures the idea of 'manyana' timelessness, as in 'later', we will do that later, or as it is known here in Canada as native time. Aboriginal peoples do not keep time the same way as those of us enslaved to the tyranny of the clock.

While the clock marks the time of capitalism in Europe its truimph was in the creation of the American nation. No other nation was so defined by the clock. A nation of shop keepers, artisans, and even the farmers, who lived worked and died by the clock. In particular by the pocket watch. Accounting practices were set by the clock, as were business deals, farmers no longered worked to the pace of the sun but to the time of the clock. And even in the darkest interiors of the east coast mills during the civil war, time was told by the hands of the clock, which ticked away the minutes of the newly industrialized proletariat lives.

England was the prototype for industrialization. The rest of the world could look to that country as an example of what to emulate and what to avoid. Some saw a land of power and prosperity and wondered aloud whether God might after all be an Englishman; others saw "dark, Satanic mills" and the "specter of Manchester" with its filthy slums and human misery. Americans in particular thought hard about industry and whether it could be reconciled with the republican virtues seemingly rooted in an agrarian order. "Let our workshops remain in Europe," urged Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia in 1785, and he was no happier for being wiser about the feasibility of that policy after the War of 1812. Nor did all his fellow countrymen agree in principle. Some saw vast opportunities for industry in a land rich in natural resources, including seemingly endless supplies of wood and of waterpower. The debate between the two views became a continuing theme of American literature, characterized by Leo Marx as The Machine in the Garden (NY, 1964).

The combination of abundant resources and scarce labor meant that industrialization in America would depend on the use of machinery, and from the outset American inventors strove to translate manual tasks into mechanical action. For reasons that so far elude scholarly consensus, Americans' fascination with machines informed their approach to manufacturing to such an extent that British observers in the mid-19th century characterized machine-based production as the "American System". Precisely what was meant by that at the time is not clear, but by the end of the century it came to mean mass production by means of interchangeable parts. The origins of that system lay in the new nation's armories, in particular at Harpers Ferry, where John H. Hall first devised techniques for serial machining of parts within given tolerances.The Machine in the Garden, John H. Hall and the Origins of the "American System"

All automation is clock driven and has been in conflict with human time, our subjective sense of being. With the advent of machining automation, as David Noble discusses in his book Progress Without People, in the late fities, a further step was taken in moving the factory towards a robotic assembly line requiring less workers and more engineers.

And today as you read this in cyberspace, your time is created by clockworks, whether in your computer, look down in the right hand corner, there is the clock.
And it's time has now become autonomous from our time. In fact as you read this your computer has it's own time that it operates under, while you read your geographical time, whether it is MST, CST, or EST or Grenwich Mean Time.

Scientists had long realized that atoms (and molecules) have resonances; each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are inherently stable over time and space. An atom of hydrogen or cesium here today is (so far as we know) exactly like one a million years ago or in another galaxy. Thus atoms constitute a potential "pendulum" with a reproducible rate that can form the basis for more accurate clocks.

The development of radar and extremely high frequency radio communications in the 1930s and 1940s made possible the generation of the kind of electromagnetic waves (microwaves) needed to interact with atoms. Research aimed at developing an atomic clock focused first on microwave resonances in the ammonia molecule. In 1949, NIST built the first atomic clock, which was based on ammonia. However, its performance wasn't much better than the existing standards, and attention shifted almost immediately to more promising atomic-beam devices based on cesium.
The "Atomic Age" of Time Standards

In fact the Y2k crsis was all about the pending apocalyptic failure of the clockworks of millions of computers around the world, and it was a vision of the collapse of capitalism as we know it. That it did not come to pass, does not lessen its social impact for that historical moment five years ago when the hands of clockwork of capitalism touched 12 midnight ending one millinieum and begining another. For in that moment in space and time, humanity held its breathe waiting for the clocks to stop. And had they, capitalism itself would have stopped.

Far from being a mere hoax, or urban myth, it was a vision of a future without clocks or capitalism. For some it was the fear of the ensuing chaos of living in a distopia without the tyranny of the clock, just as those feared living in a society without kings, rulers or bosses. For others it was a hope for a different future, a utopian moment that allowed us to imagine living in our own time rather than the rule of the clock.

That it affected America more than anywhere else, and was driven by American fears, shows the power of the clock in America. America is literally a clockwork nation, whose existance is identified with the clock and clockworks.
For American capitalism Y2k was as fearful as Bolshevism had been at the turn of last century. But the moment passed, and all was well once again. Or was it.

The reason American capitalism cannot concieve of the importance of Global Warming, or any long term disaster scenario is that due to its internal clockworks it can only think in terms of quarters of time, the time it takes for the market to make a short term profit. Wall Street is driven by its own clock works, which determine that it cannot think in long waves or over long periods of time.

Global Warming is an issue that takes in decades, if not hundreds of years to imagine. And the clockwork nation of America can only think in terms of 24/7, the ever present moment.

The Luddite movement was all about challenging work time, the tyranny of the clock and its machinery. As the situationists said; "The only difference between my free time and my work time is that I don't get paid for my free time."

Today modern capitalism is all about the speed up, whether its in the factory, or on the farm (feedlots are a form of speeding up of the fattening of cattle for the market, chemical fertilizers to enhance the growth of crops in a shorter time, the green revolution, genetic modification of crops, etc.). It's about having no time for ourselves as we are forced to work two jobs to make ends meet. In the last decade work time across Canada has increased. The average hours of work in Alberta is a 44 hour work week before overtime is considered to apply. Gone is the eight hour day for most of us.

Yet we know that if we all worked less more of us would work. The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) has successfully challenged the big three auto companies to reduce forced overtime in favour of hiring more workers.

One hundred years ago the IWW called for the 4 hour day. And we are no closer to that achievment today then we were then. But if it seemed impossible then, it is an even more utopian vision today to most people. Just as they cannot concieve of ending wage slavery and abolishing the wages system, which is not based on our labour but our 'time' at work.

The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat has never been about 'abolishing work' nor has it been about embracing the 'revolutionary worker who gives her all for the party and state'. It has been about challenging work time, challenging the tyranny of the clock, of the regimination of life, work and play, free time and work time , have no meaning without King Clock.

That is the revolutionary struggle, to end the tyranny of time as we know it.


It is the secret of the childrens rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, who was not an egg but a clockwork machine.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Humpty Dumpty is a historically important pinball machine released by Gottlieb in October 1947. It is considered to be the first true pinball machine ever produced, distinguishing it from earlier bagatelle game machines. Humpty Dumpty had six flippers, but, unlike modern pinball tables, they faced outward instead of inward and were not placed at the bottom of the table near the main outhole. Like all early pinball tables, Humpty Dumpty was constructed with wood and had backlit scoring in preset units of scoring rather than mechanical reel or electronic LED scoring.

THE TYRANNY OF THE CLOCK
Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo men's lives - they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man's functions by either clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.
George Woodcock
First published in War Commentary - For Anarchism mid-march 1944.


A Revolution in Timekeeping

In Europe during most of the Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), technological advancement virtually ceased. Sundial styles evolved, but didn't move far from ancient Egyptian principles.

During these times, simple sundials placed above doorways were used to identify midday and four "tides" (important times or periods) of the sunlit day. By the 10th century, several types of pocket sundials were used. One English model even compensated for seasonal changes of the Sun's altitude.

Then, in the first half of the 14th century, large mechanical clocks began to appear in the towers of several large Italian cities. We have no evidence or record of the working models preceding these public clocks, which were weight-driven and regulated by a verge-and-foliot escapement. Variations of the verge-and-foliot mechanism reigned for more than 300 years, but all had the same basic problem: the period of oscillation of the escapement depended heavily on the amount of driving force and the amount of friction in the drive. Like water flow, the rate was difficult to regulate.

Another advance was the invention of spring-powered clocks between 1500 and 1510 by Peter Henlein of Nuremberg. Replacing the heavy drive weights permitted smaller (and portable) clocks and watches. Although they ran slower as the mainspring unwound, they were popular among wealthy individuals due to their small size and the fact that they could be put on a shelf or table instead of hanging on the wall or being housed in tall cases. These advances in design were precursors to truly accurate timekeeping.

Accurate Mechanical Clocks
In 1656, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist, made the first pendulum clock, regulated by a mechanism with a "natural" period of oscillation. (Galileo Galilei is credited with inventing the pendulum-clock concept, and he studied the motion of the pendulum as early as 1582. He even sketched out a design for a pendulum clock, but he never actually constructed one before his death in 1642.) Huygens' early pendulum clock had an error of less than 1 minute a day, the first time such accuracy had been achieved. His later refinements reduced his clock's error to less than 10 seconds a day.

Around 1675, Huygens developed the balance wheel and spring assembly, still found in some of today's wristwatches. This improvement allowed portable 17th century watches to keep time to 10 minutes a day. And in London in 1671, William Clement began building clocks with the new "anchor" or "recoil" escapement, a substantial improvement over the verge because it interferes less with the motion of the pendulum.

clock

The clock is a particularly emblematic piece of technology.The invention of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century inaugurated a new representation of time. For the West, the clock symbolized regularity, predictibility, and control. A clock serves to produce a correspondence between events and vertices of time moments.

The disciplining of labor and of social relations through time is another profound function of the clock. Monasticism asserted the originally Jewish thesis that work is an essential kind of worship, that God's command to labor six days of the week was as binding as that to rest on the seventh. The regulation of the day, which started in the ringing of the bells in the monastery, was extended to society at large through the tyranny of the clock. cf orrery. Lewis Mumford described the relation between the clock and the monastery in Technics and Civilization. For Mumford, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." Mumford notes that the clock changes our perception of time as quantity. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process as striation. The model for an analysis of the clock would be Foucault's examination of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. (see diagram.)

It is important to keep in mind the socially coercive function of the clock. (see E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" in Giddens and Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict.) Thompson distinguishes between the "natural" rhythms of "task time" and "clock time," in which time becomes currency that in not passed but spent, which is marked by "time thrift" and a clear demarcation between work and life. Time obedience can be distiguished from time discipline: an internalization of social discipline, away from public spectacle (the clocktower) in favor of the personal (the pocket watch.)
Contents Under Pressure - A Hypertext in Progress by Christian Hubert


On Time
by Carlene E. Stephens and The Smithsonian Institution

Increasingly, after about 1820, the cadences of the ticking clock echoing in industry, railroads, and cities grew more insistent. Very much in demand, clocks and watches began to spill from American factories. More people found themselves governed by the mechanical regularity and pace of the clock.

By about 1880, the American railroads had knit together a national economy, and late in 1883 they abandoned the fifty-some regional operating times to voluntarily impose five time zones on their routes across the continent. Clocks, no longer set to the sun overhead, were instead synchronized to the new system. Some people enjoyed the conveniences of the new national standard time, but others resisted the change.

As the twentieth century dawned, the country became obsessed with using time efficiently. Like it or not, people found themselves pressured by the clock, especially in the form of factory time clocks and stopwatches. Experts in "scientific management" segmented, streamlined, and standardized both factory and office work to increase productivity. They advocated timesaving efficiencies for nearly every aspect of American life, including the home. Even leisure - time off - became defined by the clock. It was divided up, measured out, not to be wasted.

Alexis McCrossen

Current Research
Between the Civil War and the Great Depression civic and business interests across the nation erected thousands of public timepieces. Using an array of sources, including local histories, the papers of the Seth Thomas and E. Howard Clock companies, and the Historic Engineering and Buildings Surveys, I am at once assessing when, where and under what circumstances public timepieces were installed and considering what life was like under them.
The second part of the project considers the distribution and ownership of pocket watches during the transition to widespread watch ownership (1870s and 1880s). I am using the watch register of David Edwards Hoxie, who repaired watches in Northampton, Massachusetts between 1863 and 1884. By using census schedules, tax records, city directories, and other demographic data I can construct a picture of watch ownership during a critical moment in the “reformation of time consciousness.” (Michael O’Malley Keeping Watch: A History of American Time 1990)

"A Republic in Time: History, Modernity,
and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America"

My research project, a book-length study entitled “A Republic in Time: History, Modernity, and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America,” investigates how transformations in the perception of time shaped American conceptions of democratic society and modern nationhood. The fundamental premise of the study is that time is not a transhistorical phenomenon, an aspect of nature existing outside of human society, but rather a historical artifact produced by human beings acting within specific historical circumstances. I focus upon the central role that time played in the nineteenth-century United States in linking the economic transformations wrought by developing capitalism with the political imperative to define American national identity. New technologies and scientific discoveries made it possible to imagine new forms of time, including clock time and geological “deep time,” but it was American writers, pundits, and political thinkers who gave these new temporalities their significance. Theories of American nationality emphasized how the United States, as a revolutionary “modern” nation, represented a rupture with all past examples of nationhood. But despite the widespread consensus that America was different from older nations, the precise nature of America’s modernity remained to be defined. This question was a historical one, and hence it is appropriate that time itself became the most important medium through which American thinkers debated this crucial issue. Industrial capitalism and market-oriented forms of commerce seemed to demand that Americans adjust their perception to the time of the clock. Clockwork rationality became a compelling way of defining a modern way of life, but Americans critical of capitalism and those less closely linked to the market proposed other possible versions of modernity based on other modes of temporality. It is only retrospectively that clockwork rationality has come to seem an inevitable foundation of modernity. Recovering alternate ways of defining America as a modern nation helps us to avoid imposing an artificial teleology upon our national history, and reveals instead a history created by human beings in response to the contingencies of circumstance.

Reading Hamilton's Clocks: Time Consciousness in Early National and Antebellum Urban Commercial Culture

Julia Ott
Department of History
Yale University

Historians of early American labor and time consciousness have largely ignored these social and cultural consequences of an accelerating credit clock. Inspired by E.P. Thompson's seminal essay, scholars have extensively analyzed the transition from task-orientation to time-discipline, as well as the tensions between a notion of divinely originating natural time and clock time. [3] According to Thompson, "mature industrial societies of all varieties are marked by time-thrift and by a clear demarcation between 'work' and 'life'." [4] The advent of industrialism "entailed a severe restructuring of working habits," including alterations "in the inward notation of time." [5] Where men controlled "their own working lives . . .alternate bouts of intense labor and idleness" characterized labor.

[6] In contrast, factory organization of labor demanded synchronization through internalization of the mechanical clock. "Time-sense" represented "technological conditioning" while "time-measurement" embodied "a means of labor exploitation." [7] Herbert Gutman's "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America" initiated the application of Thompsonian analysis to labor relations and work culture in the United States. Gutman posited "a recurrent tension" throughout the course of the nineteenth century between the "diverse pre-modern native and foreign peoples" entering the factory system "and the demands placed upon them by the regularities and disciplines of factory labor," particularly clock-discipline. [8] Building on Gutman, subsequent scholarship noted clock-regulation's mitigation by the retention of piece-work and family systems of labor in early American factories and mills, as well as the clock's use as an instrument of planter hegemony in the South. [9]

But to fully understand capitalism's central temporal conflict, we need to know more about the origins of capitalists' "modern time/money calculus." [10] What implanted this underlying temporal logic? The answer lies in the escalating exigencies of credit in the early national period. Certainly the profit motive contributed to capitalist desires to discipline and control workers, but the credit clock provided the model for the specific selection of the time-discipline solution. Some historians have correctly accredited capitalist temporality to a legacy of mercantile notions of time-thrift and recognized both its continuity and its intensification during the course of the nineteenth century. [11] Yet the ascendancy of the credit value of time over the labor value of time and the associated development of commercial temporal anxiety remain unexamined. Historians generally prefer to see long continuities in mercantile temporality, originating in the Middle Ages with an urban, commercial break from seasonal, cyclical, natural notions of time. [12] But the recognition of the credit value of time represented an crucial step for capitalists, for it ascribed a market value to time independent of labor performed and the exploited worker performing the labor.