JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. My guest today is Robert Krulwich, the science correspondent for ABC News, NOVA and Nightline. And we're talking about time—the freezing of, the speeding up of, the slowing down of, the bizarre science of, and now the politics of time.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Speaking of which, my interview with—remember Jay Griffiths whom we heard in the previous whatever section?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: She began her interview with me with a strange declaration which she read off a piece of paper.

JAY GRIFFITHS: "This is the independent free state of Trolheim. We have no allegiance to the government. We do not recognize history, patriarchy, matriarchy, politics, communists, fascists or lollypop men or ladies. We have a hierarchy based on dog worship. Our currency is to be based on the corg barter system. We do not recognize the Gregorian calendar. By doing so, this day shall be known as one. Be afraid, be afraid all ye that hear. Respect this state."

ROBERT: [laughs] What was that?

JAY GRIFFITHS: That was the manifesto of British anti-road protests in the mid '90s.

ROBERT: The British anti-road protesters?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes.

ROBERT: They were people who don't like roads?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes. Environmentalists who were protesting against the building of roads, and one of the things that they chose to do was to write this self-governing manifesto, pointing out that for them, they were not gonna recognize Greenwich Mean Time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: At the tone, three hours, 24 minutes coordinated universal time.]

JAY GRIFFITHS: Time is a highly political subject. It initially was the British sense of time which was transported all over the world. Britons ruled their empire through ruling the oceans. They ruled the oceans because they discovered chronometers of sufficient accuracy to discover longitude. What the British did in their empires was to insist on GMT, Greenwich Mean Time and, you know, that other countries were sort of Greenwich Mean Time retarded a bit or advanced a bit, but essentially ours was the norm.

ROBERT: The real time was in London.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Ours was the real time in London.

ROBERT: What's true, of course, is the British don't own the seas anymore, but we all still use Greenwich Mean Time.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Absolutely, absolutely. We're very used to thinking that empires are to do with land. What I'm arguing is that actually there have been empires of time.

ROBERT: There's one story you tell about the rulers. This is the ruler of Turkmenistan, the current ruler of Turkmenistan, a guy named President Nyýazow. Now the month of January in Turkmenistan is called Türkmenbaşy and the month of April is called Gurbansoltan.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes.

ROBERT: Why are they called that?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Well, he named one after himself and one after his mother. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] You mean, everybody there in January calls it, you know, President-Of-Our-Country month? Whatever ...

JAY GRIFFITHS: Well, I don't actually know whether, you know, that it's taken off in the street, as it were.

ROBERT: I see.

JAY GRIFFITHS: And I rather suspect it probably hasn't. But what he wanted to do was what, in fact, many rulers have wanted to do, is to ally themselves with the clock and the calendar. I mean, like Pol Pot decided that 1975 would be year zero.

ROBERT: Pol Pot says, "All right, everything starts with me." Is that what that means?

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, exactly. Everything starts with me now when I say it does. This is year zero.

ROBERT: And to you, I guess, the joy of time, the deepest, most ecstatic version of it, is when you lose it completely.

JAY GRIFFITHS: I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's something that, you know in prayer, in meditation, in art—and in love, actually—is that people lose that very fretful ticking off kind of sense of clock time, and what you fall into is something transcendent. You know, all that you have to have done is loved somebody to know that, and to hold them for half an hour and you can know that that half an hour has lasted an eternity.

ROBERT: Time standing still in the moment like that is a really swollen now.

JAY GRIFFITHS: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that in a sense, you know, that's when the moment meets the eternal. That is all that matters is just this moment that you're holding in your hand.

JAD: Thanks, Robert. That was great.

ROBERT: Thank you.

JAD: Jay Griffiths is the author of A Sideways Look At Time. You can find out more about her on our website, Radiolab.org. We'll close our program today on time the way we started: with an excerpt of a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. You know the one.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: Except this is not the way Beethoven would have intended it to be performed. The piece he wrote to last 70 minutes has been stretched to 24 hours.

ROBERT: 24 hours.

JAD: Yep, bringing it even closer to eternity. Recently a group of San Franciscans spent an entire weekend in a gallery in a trance listening to all 24 hours. It began on a Friday evening.

WOMAN: It is 1:02 in the morning.

JAD: And went all night.

WOMAN: So it's about 3:45 in the morning.

WOMAN: It's 3:55 in the morning.

WOMAN: It's four o'clock in the morning!

JAD: Sound artist Aaron Ximm was there, otherwise known as the Quiet American. The performance was at his gallery, in fact. To close our show today, we asked him to give us a taste of what it sounded like.

AARON XIMM: It starts with this verse: dun dun dun, dun dun dun. And then da dun, da dun, da dun, da dun. But, you know, here it's like ...

MAN: Even though it's like a very simple thing to do to say okay, it's not gonna be 90 minutes it's gonna be a day, it still gives you that sense of floating time or hanging time. A time that takes a long time to pass, that you have in certain places in your life where a major thing happens. It evokes that somehow.

MAN: You know how people report that your life flashes before your eyes in a car crash or something like that? Time seems to slow down for people in, like, these really tense moments. What if you happen to be playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on your—like, on your car stereo while you were going into some car crash or something? Would it slow down and sound like this?

MAN: The idea was to stretch something to 24 hours. By stretching Beethoven's Ninth, I not only stretched a piece of music, I stretched music history.

WOMAN: Oh God, Beethoven for 24 hours.

MAN: I'm just wondering if Beethoven is slowly spinning in his grave.

MAN: Lyfinga. That's my name. I'm here in San Francisco this weekend. This is the second full 24-hour performance.

MAN: Upstairs where the performance is going on has a good vibe. Everything seems very gentle.

WOMAN: The floor is completely covered with bean bags or pillows.

WOMAN: The space has really amazing acoustics.

WOMAN: The sound system here is really good.

WOMAN: What can I say? It's designed to be contemptuous.

MAN: Why would I do this? I have no idea why I'm doing it. Will I do it again? I don't know.

WOMAN: I want to see how I feel being exposed to one unique piece of ...

WOMAN: My first response was a very calming response, and when I walked in it was overwhelming.

WOMAN: And then I came in. I wanted to stretch and, you know, open up and expand.

AARON XIMM: So I had this thought that different animals based on probably their size and their heart rate might have different senses of time. Like, you see a hummingbird zipping around in this manic way, and you think we humans must seem very slow to that hummingbird. Everything we do must almost be in slow motion to something that can just deal with things that quickly. And to a whale or some huge animal with a heart rate that is like once every few minutes, we must seem really fast. This piece is kind of like that. Suddenly, I felt like I was moving at hummingbird speed.

MAN: It's growing. It's getting louder.

WOMAN: It's growing and growing and growing, and you're just wanting it to climax. And it's not going to. Or it is, rather. It is climaxing, but it's just taking place over such a long time that to us, in our little small human time, it doesn't feel like it's climaxing.

MAN: That's true, it doesn't really climax.

WOMAN: The climax never happens.

MAN: It's just stretching out.

WOMAN: Oh God, Beethoven for 24 hours.

WOMAN: It's like euphoria for me. I don't know, maybe someone else ran out screaming.

MAN: I'm really buzzed.

WOMAN: Oh it's like an ecstatic apocalypse.

WOMAN: The other thing I felt when I came in and continued to feel was that I was being lifted up. It was just a constant lifting, lifting. There was no end, just a constant lifting, lifting.

WOMAN: [whispering] It just got quiet.

MAN: [whispering] Yeah.

WOMAN: It sounded like it was supposed to go quiet there.

WOMAN: Yeah, it'll be a stretched out quiet.

WOMAN: Yeah, it's probably just like a rest.

WOMAN: Yeah, but it'll be however many times longer. Here it comes again!

JAD: That was produced by sound artist Aaron Ximm with help from Bronwyn Ximm and Jeremiah Moore. You can find more of Aaron's work on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Jad, I was actually going to be the long A vowel, the ah dimension sequence, but I was unable to make it to San Francisco. [laughs] I guess we gotta get outta here.

JAD: Yeah, we should close the show. This week's show was produced by myself and Ellen Horne.

[JASON PEREZ: With help from Robert Krulwich, Max Bot, Brenna Farrell, Miguel Gomez-Estern, Salley Herships. Special thanks to Andy Lanset and Jenna Dare. Very special thanks to all the track and field athletes featured in this show: Shawn Crawford, Amy Accuff, Brenda Caws, Derek Atkins, John Drummins and Mary White. I'm Jason Perez. All right, hope that works for ya.]

-30-

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

Unlock member-only exclusives and support the show

Exclusive Podcast Extras

Entire Podcast Archive

Listen Ad-Free

Behind-the-Scenes Content

Video Extras

Original Music & Playlists

Unlock exclusives in The Lab

Sign up for the newsletter