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TIME PARADOX

CONVERSATION LESSON

Aaron Campbell, how are you doing tonight?

I’m doing okay. You know. I’m doing my thing.

You feeling like time is just rolling by?

Yeah, man. Time’s flying. Time’s flying.

Time’s flying. That’s because you are old.

You think so?

Yeah. When you’re young, time feels, it feels like it just goes forever. You remember when you were a kid and you just can’t wait to get older or you can’t wait until summertime.

They say time is like a roll of toilet paper.

Yeah?

Yeah. When you start pulling it, it seems like there’s a lot of it and it seems like you can pull it forever. But then the more it goes, the quicker it goes and then suddenly it’s gone.

I don’t know about that analogy.

Really? I think it’s like a roll of toilet paper.

At the end it just starts rolling really quickly.

Yeah and it’s just done. But seriously, a year of your life when you’re let’s say 45 years old, feels a lot shorter than a year of life when you were 5 or 6 years old. I mean I have these memories when I was a child of these summers because we’d had summer off of school and it’d be like a two-month or two and a half month break. But man, it seemed like forever. It seemed like such a long time. Now a year seems like a week when I was a kid.

Yeah, it just feels like it flies by. You know why some people say that is because, say, when you’re 4 years old, a year is 25% of your life. Well, if you’re 4 years old it’s only--

A very small percentage, and so you experience it differently.

So maybe that’s why or maybe when we’re younger we’re much more immersed in our experience so we’re noticing things a lot more. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

I don’t know either. I just know that my experience of time has sped up the older I get. I feel like time flies faster. In fact I was just thinking the other day about how quickly the past year has gone. I feel like Christmas and New Year’s had just come and then I experience it again. Whereas I remember as a child a whole year lasting a really long time.

Here’s a quote from Einstein about time, a very unscientific quote. “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” So by that logic, you fill the studio with pretty girls, you got a time machine.

Time would speed up really fast, wouldn’t it?

You got a time machine.

Well, there’s actually a phrase in English: Time flies when you’re having fun.

Sure. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Time flies when you’re having fun. But when you’re waiting in line at the bank or something, it seems, 10 minutes can seem like forever, right? That implies that there’s a very relative aspect to the experience of time and that we may actually have some kind of control over our experience of time if we’re aware enough to change our perception. So for example, when we’re sitting at the bank and we know we have to wait instead of suffering over it or keep looking at our watch, maybe there’s something we could do to speed up that time whether it be--

Play with our phones.

Play with our phones or imagine something or do something with our breathing or you know like not dwell on the suffering, the negative aspect of it but turn it into something positive.

That’s kind of interesting that you brought up the bank because we covered time flies when you’re having fun. That’s like your emotional state. And we’ve talked about age. The older you are, time flies faster, and the younger you are time feels like it lasts longer. And then I think the third main factor that affects our perception of time is environment, the kind of place that we’re in and certain environments can almost make us feel we’re in like a timeless state.

Or time warp or something.

Yeah.

For example.

For example, being in some beautiful place and nature, or sometimes even architecture when I’m in like a very grand-feeling building, you kind of feel like you’re entering into a different place where--

Time slows down or time stops.

Almost seems to stop sometimes.

I feel that when I’m running, actually. When I jog long distances I feel like time is warped. I feel like it just stops existing and I feel in a totally different space.

A lot of athletes talk about time changing or about time slowing down, like baseball players. They say they can see the seams on the baseball as it approaches or on the football or they can just see what’s going to happen next.

And I’ve heard when people are having like a traumatic accident like a car accident or some sort of unexpected thing happens like let’s say they’re attacked by someone, that time slows down so everything feels like it’s in slow motion. So if you’re getting into a car accident and you put on the breaks, the actual speed of the car going into and hitting another car, it actually feels like it’s in slow motion and that’s really interesting, too. All of these instances or examples suggest that time is relative. It’s not an absolute thing.

Right. But I mean in those situations we’re talking about our perception of time rather than time itself which is a real mystery. We all intuitively, we can understand that we perceive the world differently than other people but that’s something that we think of as fixed, like time itself is different is really mind-boggling.

Or it’s paradoxical in some ways.

We talked about, in the story we talked about that 1971 flight where they brought these atomic clocks, these very precise clocks on board the plane and measured how time sped up, or sorry, how time slowed down.

Slowed down for the people who are traveling.

Who are traveling fast. And these experiments have been done many times and right now we all use GPS in our phones and in our cars and those GPS satellites, the way that they can calculate our location has to take into account that they are, that time is different for these satellites because of the speed in which they’re moving.

Yeah, they’re flying really fast around the Earth.

I mean if they synchronized the clocks inside these satellites or the timing inside these satellites, our GPS wouldn’t work.

Wow.

So I mean it’s been proven time and time again that that is the true nature of time.

And that to me is conceivable, like I can conceive that. When I put my mind to it, I can try to imagine what it must be like for the person who’s traveling let’s say at the speed of light through space, they’re gone for several weeks or whatever and their experience of time is just like our experience of time. It doesn’t really change for them but the fact that they’re moving so quickly slows down time for them in an absolute sense. The time for them is slower than the time for the people on Earth because the people on Earth are moving slower than the people in space who are moving quickly. So when that person comes back to Earth, people that they knew who were their peers the same age as them, are now let’s say 50 years older. They’re elderly people and they have only aged several weeks - the traveler. I can see that. That makes sense to me in some ways.

Really?

Yeah. I feel like that makes sense. There’s something to that especially when you have experiments that show that this is happening. I can put faith in that, like I can trust that. But when it comes to thinking about traveling to the past, that’s where I lose it. I can’t conceive of that. I just don’t see how that’s possible just logically. I find it very difficult to conceive of, to imagine.

Yeah. I think there’s all different kinds of wild frameworks that people have to justify how that’s possible. I think one of them is that every moment in time still exists in perfect stillness.

It’s interesting, what is time? I mean if you think about it, time’s not like the movement of a clock. Time seems to be just a measurement of change which we think of being like the one true reality of life, is change. But if it’s possible to move in time, say backwards, then that throws out this whole idea that change is the one constant reality.

Right. Exactly. Another way to look at it is that there actually is no time, that time itself is just a mental construct. It’s a creation that we make to deal with the present moment. And that the past actually is just a memory that is constructed in each individual and that occurs in the very moment. And the future actually doesn’t exist either. It also is a mental construction that we create in the moment. And so it’s always the moment. There is no time and time really only exists in our mental projections. That’s another way to look at it which is also very interesting. That implies that there is no time at all. There’s no past. There’s no future. There’s just this very moment now and that’s it.

Getting kind of deep.

It is getting philosophical. It is getting philosophical. No doubt about it. It’s getting ontological. It’s getting heuristic.

Let’s bring it back to the story.

Yeah, sure.

I thought it was really interesting that that survey from 2014 that that was the number one or tied for number one hope for future technology.

Oh, is to travel in the past or just time travel in general?

Time travel. And this wasn’t like multiple choice. It was like you can fill in the blank with whatever you wanted to put and time travel came up tied for number one with life extension technology.

Which is related as we say in the story. It’s related.

It’s interesting that that many people… You know we’re still talking 9%. It was 9% time travel, 9% life extension but all the other choices were 1%, 2%. So it’s interesting that that many people would jump to the dream of time travel.

I think part of it has to do with people feeling a sense of regret over either actions that have taken place in the past or things that they either did that they now regret or things that they wish they had done differently.

As Frank Sinatra would say. [song in the background: My Way by Frank Sinatra]. You know this song, it’s really about like an egomaniac jerk. I did it my way. But that one point in the song is really--

Poignant.

Yeah. You can feel like there’s some truth to it and then the rest is just some blustering Donald Trump jerk.

Egotistical.

But that one part, “Regrets, I’ve had a few” I mean everyone can relate to having regrets in life. I don’t know about having regrets. It’s so deep that you would want to go back in time.

See, that’s what I find interesting. That’s what I find interesting, is that it’s kind of representative of the human condition which is to hold on to your regrets too much that it causes you so much suffering in the moment. If you ask me the question if you could go back in time and change something, what would you change, and my answer to that would be I would change nothing. Because to desire to change something in the past would imply that you’re not happy with the way things are in the present. And if you’re not happy with the way things are, you’re never going to be happy with them. We’ve got to give up our regrets.

But what if you’re a murderer, like that story?

Well, it’s hard for me to imagine that.

Well, when we turn off the mics, we can get real.

Shall I murder you, Dan, and then see if I can let go of that regret?

You keep playing your story, playing your tune for the audience.

I don’t know what it’s like.

But imagine if something really or imagine like, I don’t even want to… Just imagine somebody who is very close to you passed away before their time. I don’t even want to say.

I know, but let’s say my daughter died.

Would you…? I mean in a heartbeat you would go back.

Of course, I would, but knowing that that’s not possible, I would do everything I can to let go of that and accept the reality of it because that’s the only way out of this situation.

No, but we’re talking about if it was possible.

Oh if it were possible. I don’t know. Of course I’d want to do that, I’d want to change it.

But like hypothetically I just don’t see how it’s possible because I feel like the present is a result, it’s a fruit of everything that’s taken place in the past and if we include all the future time travelers that go to the past, this present moment is part of that as well. It can never be different than that.

Well, I mean the one way people, the one framework people have for how that’s possible is multiple universes where every decision that you make creates another timeline, another universe. So there’s infinite number of universes with every possible potential choice or action.

Well, in that case, yeah sure. I mean if it’s something that causes a great deal of pain and suffering.

So the universe where you do murder me in this studio, that happens. That’s happening right now. And you better regret it.

What if it makes me happier? What if that happened? What should I do?

Well, that’s the thing. I mean if you could go back, if you had done something of that level of darkness, I could see willing to risk everything to change, willing to risk everything. Well actually, there was an interesting part of the story that we didn’t cover in the core audio this month. We had the story about the ad, the joke ad in the magazine.

That caused lots of people to write it with expressing their regrets that they like to change.

That guy got thousands of letters over the past 20 years or more than 25 years, whatever.

It only ran in this one magazine but it was so funny to some people that loads of people copy that and put it on the internet and it’s been all over the internet. So he’s gotten thousands of letters from all over the world, all 7 continents, hundreds of countries.

So it really connected with people.

Yeah, either they thought it was really funny or there was some longing, some hope that even if it sounds crazy, my regrets are so deep that I’m willing to hold on to. So that’s what this, in the story we talk about the murderer, this woman in jail who murdered her husband.

Actually the full story is she said she was being abused by her husband and around that time she had a relationship. She was cheating on her husband with another man and she plotted with this man to murder him. And they hired some hitman. The plan was she was going to either open her daughter’s window or leave her daughter’s window unlocked and then the hitman would come in and murder the husband.

Through the window.

Yes, which is what happened. And she says that if I could go back in time and change that one event, if I could just keep that window closed, then everything would be okay. Somebody said to her in this interview or said to her, well why don’t you wish to go back even further to the point where you got involved with this other guy. And she said, well if I did that, then I would have nothing. And it turns out that she got pregnant with the other guy and she gave birth to that baby I think probably when she was in prison. And she gave that baby up for adoption and she has no connection to that boy who is now like 17 but she still loves him and she still would not wish that--

That he didn’t exist.

Right. So if you had done something… So she says when she saw this ad that she wasn’t 100%, oh, this is for real. I mean clearly anybody who writes… You’re not going to be the brightest bulb in the pack or whatever that expression is. But she didn’t believe it 100%. She said I believed it like 20%. I was just hoping that wow, how great would that be if there was a way to change this horrible thing that I did. I mean if you had a regret that deep then maybe you would be… I mean surely, like we talk about in the story, that’s the big danger that all science fiction stories talk about, is you go back and you change one thing.

That’s the butterfly effect, right?

Yeah, the butterfly effect. And you change one thing and that changes--

History.

Yeah. You know a butterfly’s wing flutters and a tsunami starts.

Right. It’s just that that’s the part this whole idea of the butterfly effect, that’s the part that just… That’s where I start losing this concept of traveling to the past because if you change everything then what used to be never actually existed at all. I mean, like this moment is a fruit of the past, and if the past contains time travelers from the future, then that’s what this is right now. It can never be any different than that. That’s the part I struggle with, conceptually.

Well, you got a whole of those multiple universes.

Yeah, I haven’t gotten around to the multiple universe thing yet.

The multiverse, I think is what some people call it. Not the universe. The multiverse.

That’s the idea that there are just numerous realities or--

Yes, the infinite realities. Anything that you can imagine and then more.

It exists in a different universe.

Yes.

So in a different universe we’re not partners in Deep English.

We could be teaching Chinese in one of these universes.

Well I think yeah, I can imagine teaching Chinese.

So what else did we cover in that story.

That’s a good question, Dan. I don’t remember.

Well maybe it’s time to wrap things up.

I guess it is time to wrap things up in this universe anyway. Maybe in a different universe we’d be talking about something completely different.

Time just flew by, didn’t it?

It did fly by. How much time flew by?

That was 21 minutes.

That’s pretty good.

It felt like the blink of an eye.

It felt like just a split second.

That’s Deep English for you.

There you go.

Enjoy it while it’s here.

While it lasts.

Already. See you until next time.

All right. See you.

The End.