“Living on Oxford Time”
I was driving home last Thursday (7/16/09) from Seaside, Oregon… I gave a talk about social media marketing to a group of local real estate brokers at Clatsop Community College. We had a great time and talked about the challenges of creating and maintaining a good web presence.
I drove down that morning from my home in Renton, Washington. It was a long day for sure, I was now on my ‘after the event high’, tired but wired. It was going on 4:00 PM, I said goodbye to my friend and sales rep, Julie Olsen, and loaded all my gear in the truck. Julie, had so kindly fixed me up with a plate of grapes, cheese, crackers, and a can of pop, for the drive home. If I didn’t run into traffic, I could make it in about 4 hours.
As I was driving I got caught up in the eternal concentric loop of channel flipping frustration on the FM band hoping to find something I could listen to. I forgot my iPod and have heard the 4 CD’s I had with me far too many times.
From Seaside, It takes about an hour to get to the Columbia River at Longview. I was headed down that big hill on Highway 30 towards the Lewis and Clark bridge (awesome view) when I stumbled upon an NPR show hosted by Paul Kennedy on KXOT 91.7 FM, “IDEAS”. They were talking about time. What a great accidental find… A great conversation created and produced by Dan Falk. He is an award winning freelance writer and broadcaster specializing in science stories, with a particular focus on physics, astronomy and cosmology.
Dan talks with David Deutsch, Julian Barbour, and Roger Penrose at Oxford. They’ve each spent the last few decades thinking very deeply about the nature of time, and have come to some very counter-intuitive conclusions.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/living-on-oxford-time/index.html
Listen to Living On Oxford Time (.ram file runs: 54:00)
One of the implications of this “timeless” perspective is that we are all, in a sense, immortal. Each stage of a person’s life, Barbour argues, exists permanently in some particular universe. “You” as a young child co-exists with “you” as a young adult and “you” as a senior citizen, simultaneously, somewhere in this vast set of universes. Julian Barbour
Dan Falk’s web site: http://www.danfalk.ca/
2 years ago