Alan Burdick > Quotes

“So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Indeed, he [Augustine] wrote, what we call three tenses are only one. Past, present, and future don't exist per se; they are all present in the mind - in our current memory of past events, in our current attention to the present, and in our current expectation of what's to come. "There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things".”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“time is not a thing but a passage through things—not a noun but a verb.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“You can't ever know the difference between a temporal dilation and a temporal contraction. All you can ask is a relative question: which felt longer? We don't ever know which is the 'normal' one. ~David Eagleman”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Our sense of time's passage is rooted not in one region of the brain but results from the combined working of memory, attention, emotion, and other cerebral activities that can't be singularly localized, Time in the brain, like time outside it, is a collective activity.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Many readers responded, among them Marcel Proust, who took delight in the question. “I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say,” he wrote. “Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.” His point being, how unfortunate that it takes being aware of an ending”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“the “clock” is little more than a pair of genes that, eventually and by means of various intermediaries, turn themselves off. Our architect isn’t simply mailing out a blueprint; she is sending out bottled messages addressed to her future self. Eventually, when enough bottles accumulate in the sea, the message will reach her, and the message says, “Take a nap.” When the architect falls asleep and the clock genes are at rest, protein production ceases. The existing proteins degrade in the cytoplasm and stop pressing into the nucleus and shutting off the genes, freeing them to again issue orders. If that process sounds circular, that seems to be what natural selection was favoring. What’s remarkable isn’t what is produced (which is nothing physical, all told) but the period of production: the cycle from the moment the clock genes are first activated, then switched off, then switched on again takes, on average, twenty-four hours. Something is produced after all: not a molecule but an interval.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“For the longest time I ignored or dismissed the adage that time flies as we get older because I didn't feel old enough for the "as we get older" clause to apply. Lately, though, I've started to think that I am, and that it does. Time isn't speeding up; it's pace is cruelly steady, a fact of which I am ever more painfully aware.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“In 1866, when it was noon in Washington, D.C., the official local time in Savannah was 11:43; in Buffalo, 11:52; in Rochester, 11:58; in Philadelphia, 12:07; in New York, 12:12; and in Boston, 12:24. There”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“We bend time to make time with one another, and the many temporal distortions we experience are indicators of empathy; the better able I am to envisage myself in your body and your state of mind, and you in mine, the better we can each recognize a threat, an ally, a friend, or someone in need. But empathy is a fairly sophisticated trait, a mark of emotional adulthood; it takes learning and time. As children grow and develop empathy, they gain a better sense of how to navigate the social world. Put another way, it may be that a critical aspect of growing up is learning how to bend our time in step with others. We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a synchrony of clocks, as we lend ourselves fully to the contagion of time.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Plants have a circadian clock, which many species use to turn on their chemical defenses in anticipation of morning attacks from insects; the plants are more resistant to attack when their clocks are functioning normally. Janet Braam, a cell biologist at Rice University, and her colleagues found that the circadian clocks of cabbages, blueberries, and other fruits and vegetables continue to tick even after the plants have been harvested. But under the constant light of a grocery store—or the constant dark of a refrigerator—the circadian rhythms start to dissipate, as does the cyclical production of key compounds, making the plant more susceptible to bugs and perhaps diminishing its taste and even its nutritional value.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

“Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting sense of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one’s to-do list, much less to confront the world’s true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends.”
― Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation