Time
2001–2002
Topic Director: Holly
Pittman, Professor, History of Art
Time is one of humanity’s most perplexing
and challenging concepts. What is time? Is it a universal
concept? Is it uniquely human? Will there ever be a
unified theory, or must we accept time as an ever changing
notion shaped by physical and cultural contexts?
Early in the 20th century, scientific
ideas of time were turned completely on their head.
Newton's prevailing belief that time was unchanging
and objective, an ether surrounding events, suddenly
gave way to Einstein’s theory that time does not
flow equally without relation to anything external.
Instead, time came to assume the full historical nature
of particular moments. Like space, time was relative
to the speed of light.
But time is not only a problem for science.
Uniquely for humans, time pervades every experience,
every environment, every action. While all life and
indeed all matter exists in time, only humans struggle
with it. Only humans divide experience into past, present,
and future, or before and after. Only humans remember
long distant events. Only humans project events into
the future. Only humans struggle with the myriad irresolvable
dualities presented by our ability to "know"
time.
All humans measure time, beginning, no
doubt, as observations on the regularity of change,
both internal—the beating of the heart—and
external, the rising of the sun. But only in the West
has time been categorized, commodified, controlled,
and measured down to the nanosecond. In the last 200
years, social time, or the time needed for a message
to travel from sender to receiver has been reduced to
almost nothing. Around the world in eighty days can
now be accomplished physically by any one of us in a
matter of hours. And, a message, an image, or a virtual
experience can be sent and received almost instantaneously.
How will this collapse of time affect
humans and the world—or worlds—we inhabit?
Will it alter the ways in which we experience time?
Will it lead to new creative solutions or spiritual
and physical dilemmas?
Humans, and especially humanists, must
approach time from multiple directions. No one discipline,
philosophy, science or experience can adequately describe
the ever increasing complexity of time. Only by coming
together and crossing boundaries can the limits of our
understanding and feelings about time expand, like the
universe, ever faster.
How does history, a backbone of the humanities,
use time, and how does that affect the story told? Time
has pervaded literature since antiquity: heroes struggle
with mortality, seek immortality; stories, poems, and
drama play with simultaneous, reversed, and experienced
time. The visual arts and especially music have time
at their very essence.
What are some of the millions of ways
we use time to express emotions, thoughts, intuitions?
The construction of the past, the structure
of memory, the physics and metaphysics of time, the
measurement of time, the social construction of time,
the temporal art of music, the biology of time, and
especially the inevitable fact of life, aging, and death,
all are subjects the Penn Humanities Forum explores
through lectures, exhibits, movies, musical programs,
literary readings and more.
When was the past, how is the now, and
what will the future be? These only begin to sample
its rich and open-ended potential.
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Programs & Fellows
2001–2002
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