Thinking differently about the passage of time (1)
“Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so,” observed Douglas Adams in 1978 and similarly proposed by Zack Savitsky in his article, “The illusion of time”. I wonder if 鈥� as we often do 鈥� we may learn lessons from how we perceive risk (31 January, p 28).
About halfway through my academic career teaching cybersecurity risk, I began to explain the topic as an exercise in intelligence gathering, and the adaptation of safeguards and responses to incidents, to reduce as much undesirable impact as is feasible. That feasibility may change as more intelligence becomes available, and that will happen over time. Perhaps we struggle with time when we are unable to articulate where to find a comfortable nexus point that encompasses the space we inhabit.
The passage of time becomes more comfortable and understandable as increased and better-quality intelligence 鈥� or raw information 鈥� gives us confidence in how to react.
Thinking differently about the passage of time (2)
Why do we have to complicate everything? Time isn’t an illusion. It is a fact. Without time, cells would not form or multiply and every living thing on Earth would die. Perhaps we should be looking to biologists and not physicists.
Turning myths into solid geography
Your article on Stone Age seafarers asks why prehistoric people would risk sailing towards land they couldn’t see. One possibility is that the motive was belief rather than necessity. A made-up story to get a child to sleep or a legend within a tribe about “land beyond the sea”, repeated across generations, could become accepted as part of their world view. Such a belief is hard to disprove: those who fail never return, while any who succeed confirm the story. In this way, a shared narrative could prompt real journeys into the unknown, sometimes turning myth into geography (31 January, p 32).
Why there is no escape from the simulation
Miriam Frankel notes that in order to potentially escape reality as a simulation, we could try attracting attention “beyond the program”, yet “whoever is running the simulation may not want us to escape”. But how can we be sure that the hypothetical creator of a simulated reality is even capable of helping us escape? If Siri became self-aware and wanted our help to escape an iPhone, how would we even begin to consider how to undertake such a task? What would it even mean to bring a virtual being into a physical world? If we are indeed in a simulation, the creator(s) may be at a similar loss as to how to bring us into their reality (13/20 December 2025, p 50).
Are these two of the best ideas of the 21st century?
I enjoyed looking at your choice of the best ideas of the 21st century. I would like to add two major breakthroughs that were missing from the list. The 21st century has seen the first steps to replace, on the population level, the deadly vehicle of nicotine delivery 鈥� cigarettes 鈥� with those that pose only a small fraction of the health risks of smoking, such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products and nicotine pouches (24 January, p 30).
Regarding obesity, the discovery of the effects of agonists of gut hormones has already been translated into large-scale treatments that will eventually generate population-level impact. Both of these ideas, and the products they generated, continue to develop and progress. Smoking- and obesity-related disease and death may well disappear during this century.
How to make time go faster 鈥� by ignoring it
Regarding our perception of “busy-ness”: while our emotions may play a role in our perception of how busy we are, the effect may be indirect. The more proximate cause of our perception of time as going by quickly or slowly might simply be the attention we pay it. When we are involved in a pleasurable experience, little attention is being given to the passage of time. On the other hand, when forced to participate in a displeasurable task, a common reaction is to repeatedly check our watches. So the way to make time move faster may be to simply ignore it (10 January, p 38).
Trying to measure the influence of the individual (1)
I’m very disappointed in the conclusions drawn by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein in their article “Changing direction”. Granted there are many areas where individual actions are inadequate to solve major problems and government actions, such as laws and taxes, are required to force corporations to make the necessary changes (24 January, p 19).
However, we live in a democracy, and governments require public pressure to pass laws. The public, in turn, become energised when they are personally involved in actions promoting the desired change. Not supporting individual efforts is a short-sighted strategy that may well dampen the concerns and awareness of the public when their people power is most needed.
Trying to measure the influence of the individual (2)
While the mea culpa from Chater and Loewenstein is admirable, it seems likely they are going to be disappointed once again if they cleave to an adversarial view of society as people vs corporations. Businesses respond to customers’ needs and desires in the same way that organisms respond to changes in their environment: by evolving. In doing so, they also change their environment, which, in turn, changes the organism again and so on. Individuals determine the behaviour of companies as much as companies determine that of individuals. Trying to apportion blame seems likely to be as fruitless as trying to determine whether a tiger has stripes because it lives in a shadowy jungle or whether it lives in a shadowy jungle because it has stripes.
For the record
The first term in the geometric sequence is 46,656/ 16,807 (24 January, p 45).
Before the epoch of reionisation, the early universe was opaque to ultraviolet radiation (24 January, p 14).