>PG: Yes, so then I was reflecting on the universe expanding. We know that it is and can measure it, by the way time is operating, or by the way we see a star exploding far away. For various reasons, when a physicist tells me that the universe is expanding, I say “ok, let’s go back to the dance floor.” The dance floor is getting bigger, what does that mean? It means that time has to slow down.
>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?
But he is not interpreting his experience. If I understood him correctly, he is claiming his differing perception of time vs his grandchildren is due to some physical phenomenon.
Yeah, but he was making some pseudoscientific conjecture about the objectivity of time and using "expansion of the universe" to justify it, not merely the subjectivity of time passage. I mean, it's an interesting hot take, but it's definitely reminiscent of pseudoscience quackery.
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.
This is equivalent to saying "visual art is just basic arithmetic" because you found out that the relationships between colors can be described with bit operations on their RGB values.
"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?"
You would be right if he was talking about the "subjectivity of perception". But he is not. He is talking about "stars exploding far away", and the expansion of the universe, and relativity. His quote, I repeat: "But what if time is actually speeding up? If everything is changing at the same speed, there is no way to measure it. [...] What I suggest is that these are not subjective, but rather objective experiences.". And this is quackery.
I thought 'scientism' described excessive faith in the scientific method, and/or dogmatic positivism. How does that apply to calling someone out for explicitly invoking scientific findings in a misleading or nonsensical way?
Because they’re just having a discussion about interesting ideas...? It’s not a science journal.
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.
I think most people have no problem with science being used as a launching pad for speculation, or a source of metaphor and artistic inspiration, or a cultural product to playfully riff on. The reason some are frustrated by the quoted lines, I think, is that Glass seems to be cloaking his poetic or metaphysical speculations in real science, and perhaps even literally putting them forward as scientific ideas. From that perspective they have more in common with the fuzzy, lazy thinking of pseudoscientists than with the fantastical literature of Borges.
If you're frustrated by a layman having a layman's understanding of theoretical physics, then you need to re-evaluate your life. Glass is a composer. No one in the world looks to him for guidance on understanding relativity.
I’m sorry that you don’t see the difference between the two. Philip Glass isn’t an activist campaigning to alter the public’s understanding of physics. He’s just a guy relaying his beliefs in an interview where he is being pressed to explain them.
>I thought 'scientism' described excessive faith in the scientific method, and/or dogmatic positivism. How does that apply to calling someone out for explicitly invoking scientific findings in a misleading or nonsensical way?
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...
They're not having a "theoretical discussion" any more than me reading a phone book. What they're saying is entirely meaningless, baseless, and devoid of insight.
>You would be right if he was talking about the "subjectivity of perception". But he is not. He is talking about "stars exploding far away", and the expansion of the universe, and relativity.
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.
I actually vaguely recall an SR paper put forth by a relatively famous physicist that actually took the view that time was 'longer' in the past, to the point of being infinite at the big bang. This would mean the universe had always existed. IIRC, the model was mathematically valid and actually explained some observations well. Unfortunately, it did not match other observations.
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 anybody is entitled to say anything they please, yet when you claim time may be speeding up based on the fact that you and your children disagree on whether the summer went by faster or slower, or when Deepak Chopra speaks about "quantum medicine", or whetever, you are being a quack.
>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.
>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...
I am no longer a physics undergraduate, by the way, I solid get that changed. But I appreciate the effort to stick to the discussion and not dig irrelevant information /s.
You're right. This is one of our greatest living artists, a human cultural treasure. We should weigh every word, every performance carefully. His work offers us incredible insight into ourselves.
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.
I don't consider culture "wholly subjective". Just somewhat subjective.
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.
If Stephen Hawking had ever talked about the objectivity of music or any art in such patently wrong terms, I hope people would call him out on it. Otherwise people like me might take his word for it, precisely because of his purported greatness.
Why does anyone do anything creative, if it’s not necessary to do so? Who are you to say that their feeling regarding the nature of a particular phenomenon is invalid?
I'm not sure I follow. He has no authority nor knowledge nor evidence to make those claims.
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.
Sometimes it's interesting to hear what incredibly talented creative people think, from their perspective, because their understanding of the world likely in some way influences their work.
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
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.
"We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty..."
Pro-tip: don't look to artists to learn about physics.
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.
It's not a disconnect from reality, older people do actually feel like time is "going faster." It's a common perception that might have something to do with the fact that a year is 100% of your life when you're 1 and 1% of your life when you're 100.
There's a big stack of effects that reached all the way from SR to perception.
Physics is something that is fascinating to anyone with a bit of curiosity, intimately part of the human experience on every scale, and difficult to work through in its more advanced (or nuanced) features. I'd rather he came up with fantastical conjectures than felt like it was forbidden to him. As long as people take it as the musings of a musician and he never presents them as supported by evidence, of course.
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.
Reminded me of this interview with a japanese garden designer, and his consideration of how the elements in a garden change at different rates. Plants that grow/bloom seasonally, moss that spreads over the years, and rocks that don't change at all in human time scales.
So many people arguing here, completely missing the point of science. Whether to attempt to prive OR disprove Glass' ideas, one must think 'how can I test this idea experimentally?'
I honestly don't think a lot of people here know how to think artistically, which is to think in a completely free way, independent of all existing rules, systems, comparisons, judgement. The latter aspect (rules, judgement) is fairly essential for the engineering aspect of technology as well as the business aspect of starting/developing/running a company - at least just to get the thing running to begin with.
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:
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.
58 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThe 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.
>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?
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...
One of the greatest living artists talking about the subjectivity of perception and you refer to it as quackery.
It hurts my heart.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWcmuk2tN7M&t=529s
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.