The Times They Are a-Changin'
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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, depending on where you are, when you are. This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser talking to you from right now, which is not your right now, even though you are hearing it right now. Anyway, I have an episode for you, one we made a few years ago. It is both timeless and timeful. Time-centric is maybe a better word.

It's an episode about time because the vast majority of us, no matter our philosophy of time, whether you think of it as linear or cyclical, time feels static, right? Like no matter what you use to measure it, a second, a year, a millennium, those are constant units, right? Like taking away the same amount. Not so fast. The times, as they say, are a-changin'.

Set your watches and let's go.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. I want to tell you a story about a discovery I made. Not me, I just learned about it from other people, but it has made me completely reconsider what a year means and specifically how big a year really is. How big a year... What? How big a year really is. I don't know. How is a year... How long a year is? Well, if you're confused now, I think I can confuse you even more. I'm going to begin this investigation...

by introducing you to a little creature in the sea called a coral. Coral's a shelly animal, a little creature. That's Neil Shubin. I'm a paleontologist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Just like a clam has an animal, a clamshell has an animal inside it, so do corals. A little fleshy, wormy thing? Exactly, and it wears its skeleton on the outside. And because they sit in the same place for their whole life, they're really sensitive to local environmental changes. Meaning what?

Think about it this way. Let's just sort of think about what happens to a creature as it lives its life in the water, which is what these things do. You know, we live in a world of cycles, of cycles on cycles. Temperature rises and falls. Light rises and falls. The tides rise and fall several times in the course of a day.

So you think about what that means for creatures living in water. What it means for corals, says Neil, is that they're growing. They're slapping on new skeleton, if you will, new shell. In time with these cycles of rise and fall, of light and dark, hot and cold, and... Hello, hello. Hi. You can actually see these changes written onto their shells, maybe into their shells. Emily. Andy. And that's why Andy Mills and I called up our pal Emily Grassley, whose job is...

I'm the chief curiosity correspondent of the Field Museum in Chicago. That's your actual title? The chief curiosity correspondent, yes. You brought some corals, did you? We have many corals. We have corals all over the studio desk right now. All right. All right. Let's cut it. Because when you cut into these shells... Oh, it's warm. A little bit of water. We can spritz it on there and cool it off. Right off, you can see a pattern.

You see these gray stripes. And they're all, I mean, they're all different variations of gray, but some are really dark gray and some are tan. They're like bands running either through or across the shell. They kind of radiate out like the bands of a tree. And between the bands, there are spaces. You've got a stripe, then a space.

Stripe, then a space. Stripe, then a space. But when you hold it up close to your eye, if you look closer in between the stripes, you can see sort of. Wow. You can see the lines. You can see that the spaces are filled with faint little lines. And that's where the piece of this story is just so fascinating.

Because in 1962, a paleontologist, Professor John Wells, was looking at some corals just like these. He was just sitting there saying, okay, well, what can we figure out from coral shells? So what he did is he did something really simple. He says, well, golly gee, why don't I count the number of little lines between these bands? Just, you know, just to see. So he starts counting. It's, you know, 100, 200 lines, 300 lines, 310, 320. And every time he counted... He got a number. Yeah.

Around 360, 365. Wait a second. Familiar number, no? Doesn't take a whole lot of inference that, hey, maybe those individual rings represent, you know, a daily pattern. Meaning each of these little lines actually equaled a day. And why...

They're not just making a gray mark after 365. No. What are the gray lines? Well, the thicker lines are the times of the year when the coral grows a lot. But if you've got a summer coral that it grows a lot in one summer, then it goes quiet, then it grows a lot the next summer. So that's, again, that marks a year. Those big bands are kind of like, ah, no.

Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. There are actually calendars and clocks inside each of these things. You just have to know how to read them. So this guy, Professor Wells, what he did was then, this is the really bold bit, I thought, which is he then said, well, okay, that's a living Carl. Let's look at some fossils.

He was, after all, a paleontologist. So he was at Cornell University, and Cornell University is surrounded by rocks around 370 feet.

or so million years old. And he collected some nice corals, and there are a lot of nice coral fossils known from there. And he opened up these ancient skeletons. And he did the count. Found 100 days, 200 days. He was expecting 360 to 365. 368. And lo and behold, he found 400? Between 400 and 410.

Really? Yeah, and he looked at lots of specimens. That number, the 400 number, kept showing up. What does that mean? Well, that means that it's now reasonable to think that back in the day, you know, 380 million years ago, there were more days in a year. And he published a paper saying more or less that. And right away...

Clam scientists said, "Well, if that's true for corals, then it's got to be true for my animal, the clam." And the oyster people said, "Well, it's got to be true for oysters." And mussel folks said, "It's got to be true for mussels." This paper set off a bit of a cottage industry of folks applying this technique to other species.

In looking at these other species, they found that the general trend is absolutely correct. That when you compare modern animals to ancient animals, you will find they record, the old ones, more days in a year. So you go back to a time period called the Ordovician, which is about 450 million years ago. A typical year had about 415, 410 days in it.

If you go to the time period I work on in the Devonian, about 360 million years, probably about 400. So what you see is the number of days in a year has declined from over 400 to what we have now, which is 365. So we have lost 40 days since the... Yeah, since creatures first started to walk on land. So now comes the obvious question. Why? Why would there be more days then than there are now?

Okay, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. So a year is a trip around the sun. That's right. And days are when we spin around and we're going around the sun. Okay, so maybe if you want to squeeze more days into a year, maybe it just means the trip around the sun is...

took longer back then? Well, if you ask astronomers about that, I asked Chris Impey at the University of Arizona, and he says... There's no sense that the length of time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun is changing. Because the Earth's orbit around the Sun is basic physics, and it hasn't really changed significantly. He's pretty sure of that.

So then what is it? Well, Chris says the answer takes us back about four and a half billion years to a time when the Earth was very young. So there was this crazy period of time lasting about 50 million years. Which they called the Great Bombardment Period. There was still a lot of debris left over from the formation of the solar system. So the meteor impact rate was thousands of times higher. The Earth was still like a tacky magma. And so there was hail, brimstone.

Endless rain. I mean, kind of crazy time, really. And a bit of that mayhem, of course, we think, gave birth to the moon. There was a huge collision and a rock about the size of Mars banged into us, flung a hunk of Earth shrapnel into orbit, and those pieces coalesced and became our moon.

which is now sort of parked right next to us. And so it sort of tugs us around in a kind of hefty way. I thought we tugged the moon. Oh, it works both ways. We tug the moon and the moon tugs us and the force is actually equal. So it's kind of like a dance. It's a dance. I tug the moon and the moon tugs me. Exactly. It's a celestial waltz.

And it's that dance, that waltz, that explains why the Earth used to have 450 days in a year, then 400 days in a year, and now only 365. Well, I don't see how this explains anything. Well, first of all, let's just remember what a day is.

A day is a full spin of the planet from the Sun coming up in the morning then going down coming up the next morning. So one spin, a total spin equals a day. Yes. We all know that. Now today we make 365 of these spins as we orbit the Sun. That would be a year. Right. But back when the Earth was born, when it was all by itself dancing alone, in those days it spun faster.

It was making more of these spins as it went around the sun, so a year had more days in it. But then along comes the moon to join the dance. And now here's the key, according to Chris. Earth is spinning faster than the moon is orbiting it. A dance partner takes a month to come around us. We take 24 hours. And you know how it is when you're dancing with a partner who's slower than you are? Then you have to tug them along.

which is what has happened here gravitationally. We are constantly tugging the moon along. It is constantly dragging us down. There's a transfer of energy here that over billions of years has caused the Earth's spin to slow down just a little bit, a teeny, teeny bit. And as the spin has slowed...

Well, our days have gotten longer. And if you do the math, you calculate that the day is getting longer by 1.7 milliseconds each century. 1.7 milliseconds each century? What this means on a daily basis is that today was 54 billionths of a second longer than yesterday. And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before.

And the day before that was 54 billionths of a second longer than the day before that, which was 54. And if you extrapolate that out over the millions of years people like me think about. That's Neil Shubin again, the paleontologist. That becomes quite significant. So you're telling me that today is the shortest day of the rest of my life. Yes.

Andy worries about these things. Well, you're not going to live longer because of this, I'm sorry to say. No, so this moon dance does not affect the ticking of time. It just affects what we choose to call a day. And by the way, one of the consequences of this dance is we lose a little energy to our moon every year. And the moon picks up a little energy from us because these things are always equal.

Think about like when you throw a ball, the more energy you use, the further the ball is away from you. Well, as we add a little more energy to the moon, the moon very slyly moves a little further away from us. Every year it's about a couple of inches, according to Chris. The length of a worm. Really? So the moon is getting a worm's distance further away from us every year.

Yeah. And he says if you go back about 4 billion years... The moon was originally about 10 times closer than it is now. 10 times closer? Imagine a moon looking 10 times bigger than it does now. That would have been crazy. Also, the days would have been six hours long. Six hours long? To me, what this says is that everything that we take for granted as normal in our world...

Ice at the poles, seas in certain places, continents configured the way they are, the number of days in a year. All that is subject to change. And all that has changed. All that has...

dramatically changed over the course of the history of our planet. And that includes how we measure time itself. So, you know, when I'm sitting in a hole in the middle of the Arctic digging out a fish fossil, every now and then, you know, I pinch myself and say, here I am in the Arctic digging out a fish fossil that lived in an ancient subtropical environment. You know, the juxtaposition between present and past sometimes is utterly mind-blowing. But it's very informative about our own age and that

We think things are eternal, but they're not. Everything is subject to change. Change is the way of the world. We are going to change now to a break, but we've got more coming up after that.

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Hello again, you're listening to Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. We are discussing the flexibility, the surprising flexibility of time today. And in the first segment, we learned all about how coral has marked the ever-changing march of time, how days were once shorter, years once longer. Now we're going to pivot.

to a more, I mean, I don't know, it's like taking that idea of time flexibility and just taking it to an absurd, absurd place with our host emeritus, Robert Krolwich. So I just want to play you a little bit of a, can we do this? Can we just add an end to the end? Because that's what I'd like to do. I was talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an astrophysicist and who thinks about spin, which we've just thought about, thinks about

the inner solar system, which we've just thought about. So here's him and I talking about holding on to time. It's a little goofy, but here it is, just for the fun of it. So if you're on Earth and you're walking around Quito on the equator...

If you're walking at four miles an hour, your day will go sort of the normal way. The sun will rise behind you, go overhead, and then go down the other side. Well, if you're stationary, it will be a 24-hour day, yes. Yeah. If you started walking on the equator, depending on which direction you walked, your day will either last longer or shorter. Okay? So if you walk...

West the faster you walk the longer your day will become you could walk at a pace We have a 25 hour day a 27 hour day There's a speed with which you can walk on the equator and the earth going west where your day lasts forever And that is the rotation rate of the earth you would have compensated roughly what that would be a gerbil a gerbil running on a beach ball to rotating beach ball so that would on the top of a Beach ball so that speed for the equator is about a thousand miles an hour

So the equator moves 1,000 miles an hour and that gives us the 24-hour day.

If you want to go 1,000 miles an hour to the opposite direction, you will stop the day. The sun will never move in the sky, and your day will last. Superman did that once, I think, when he had this thing with Lois. Superman would have so messed up everybody on Earth for having stopped the rotation of the Earth, reversed it, and then set it forward again. Yes, he did that. He would have scrambled all, anything not bolted to the Earth would have been completely... Really, would have flown off? Yeah, yeah. So depending on your latitude, equatorial residence, if you stop the Earth...

They were going at 1,000 miles an hour with the Earth. You stop the Earth and you're not seat belted to the Earth, you will fall over and roll due east 1,000 miles an hour. In our mid-latitudes, we're in New York. You can do the math. We're moving about 800 miles an hour due east.

and stop the Earth. We will roll 800 miles an hour due east and crash into buildings and other things that are attached to the Earth. That are attached to the Earth. But let's, going back to Venus now. Oh, you want to go to Venus? Isn't this enough for you? No, I wanted to, the whole point was to go to Venus because it's so different there. Yeah, on every way. No, it's about the same size and about the same surface gravity.

But that's it. It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a runaway greenhouse effect. It is heavy volcanic activity that repaves the surface periodically. So there are very few craters on Venus. Just unpleasant in general. Unpleasant. It rotates very slowly. That's what I want to stop at. So how slowly does it rotate? I don't remember the exact number. It's like four miles an hour or something like that. Yeah, it's some very slow rate at its equator.

Slow enough so that you don't need airplanes to stop the sun. You don't need special speed devices. You could probably trot and stop the sun on the horizon or wherever the sun is in the sky. So if you're that guy from Jamaica, what's his name? Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt. And you happen to be on...

Venus for a little while and you decide to go for a run. What happens to Hussein during the run? Okay, so normally the Sun would rise in one direction and set in the other. Depending on which direction you chose to run in, you could reverse your day.

and have the sun rise in the opposite side of the sky than it normally would. But I think Venus is rotating slowly enough that you wouldn't have to be Usain Bolt. I'd have to check my numbers on this. Oh, I don't think you would. Maybe in order to have the sun actually sort of seem to go backwards, that's what you're saying, is the sun would go backwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'd be having lunch, you're Usain Bolt, and you're going to say, now I'm going to run. Mm-hmm.

And the sun's going backwards towards the morning horizon. Yes, you can reverse the sun. That's correct. Wow, that is a really good reason to sprint. I think. Well, but who cares about the sun anymore? Me! If I were the same, I'd go up to him and say... Is the sun telling you when to eat lunch? I don't think so. Your stomach is telling you when to eat lunch. You're saying, okay, Hussein, you eat breakfast, but you want to have lunch real soon? Run! So that the sun is now at the top of the sky, so now you can legally have lunch. Yeah.

No! You are not buying my poetic premises at all today. This is the 21st century, Jack. And the sun is... We wake by alarm clocks, not by roosters and sunlight. I'm sorry.

It just doesn't work that way. I wish I could help you out by thinking. Let's suppose. I am not going to depend on running on Venus to get the sun in the middle of the sky at my command so that I can have lunch. Okay. All right. But let's suppose you're a rooster and you like to crow at dawn. That's just a deep feeling in you. You could totally mess with a rooster this way. Yes, that's what I want to do.

Usain Bolt carrying a rooster with him. Usain Bolt carries a rooster on Venus. He does it in a remarkably fast sprint. The rooster, having started the run in the middle of the day, well past the crowing period, feels a strange compulsion to crow two hours into the run. Because he ran backwards to the sunrise rather than to the sunset. Well, he ran forwards, but the sun went backwards relative to him. Yes, he ran in the other way to...

reverse the sun back to sunrise. Yeah, and the rooster is going to, will need therapy. That's so brilliant. Step by step to the mountain top we fly. Not all in one, but one step.

Well, I think it's time for us to definitely go now. Yeah, we should definitely go. I'm Chad. I'm Robert. Thanks for listening.

Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Ebenrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyanusambandham, Matt Gilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

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