Psychophysics of Time

Leonardo, Vol. 7, pp, 43-45. Pergamon Press 1974. Printed in Great Britain PSYCHOPHYSICS OF TIME Michael Hoare* If any single abstraction has claim to be central to the rather ill-matched concerns of artist, philosopher and scientist, it is surely the concept of time [1]. That time is inescapable may be a platitude, yet it is one that demands a certain resolution, one in which we sense uncomfortably the need either to accommodate or succumb. The particulars of our response to the experience of time are fascinating, puzzling and magnificently varied-but they are nothing if not inseparable from the element that gives rise to them. Time, the ineffable paradox, both sustains and defeats us, at once the unyielding matrix of our works and aspirations, the fluid, pervasive and mobile that informs and transfigures our achievement in the very act of bearing it away. Yet, in keeping with this general ambivalence, our very intimacy with time confuses and alienateswhatever form oflogical apparatus we bring to bear, the reference remains elusive; we seem as much at a loss to focus as to grasp. Likewisethe critic, seeking a common truth at the exposed margins of art and science, will find many clues, though hardly a ready synthesis in timebearing schemata. The interplay of temporal elements in languages is itself complex and notoriously deceptive. The rigour cultivated by physicist and mathematician is fugitive outside their own territory, being in any case haunted by a whole literature of logical paradoxes that, ironically enough, have themselves evolved to match the increasing subtlety and precision of the timeconcept . The insidious truism of time and our sense of vulnerability to it permeate freely from the philosophical to the casual. We are a little too ready to cover its uglier, more corrosive aspects in deceptively gentle metaphors. We are markedly tolerant of the curious mixture of loftiness and banality which reflection on time seems to call forth. A knowing time-consciousness may be a traditional ingredient in poetic sensibility, yet at a more ordinary level proverbs about time have a way of being among the most feeble in the language. Books specifically dedicated to the problem of time are rare enough to command immediate attention, especially if they purport to bridge the traditional boundaries between philosopher and scientist, experimentalist and theoretician, psy- • Physicist living at 20 Bradboume Street, London SW63TE , England. (Received 11 January 1973.) 43 chology and physics and, hopefully, art and the rest. As difficult as it is to find common ground among practitioners under the above headings, the critic of the visual arts, for whom allusions to motion and progression are second nature,can hardly afford to be unconcerned with their differences . For as surely as there is even casual association of movement and space in the field of discussion of a work of art, the implicit reference to time must be accounted for, at least in some metacritical fashion. The two books particularly discussed here [2, 3] are about as different in style and approach as could be, though neither author admits to any particular limitations in his outlook. Indeed, for all the superficial resemblance of the titles, they could almost be imagined to have been written about two quite different entities that happen to share the name 'time', so total is the gulf between Leonard W. Doob, speaking the language of experimental psychology [2], and Hans Reichenbach, the mathematical physicist who served his time honorably in relativity theory and foundations of probability before turning to write popular books on scientific philosophy [3]. The Direction ofTime is, of course, a paperback reprint of a posthumous work first published in 1956 [4], much praised by physicists and since analysed in a number of key essays [5, 6]. Both Doob's and Reichenbach's books are immensely assured and, in their different ways, constructively speculative; both are evidently the product of the best part of an academic lifetime rich with more technical studies. Here the resemblance ends abruptly. Doob's The Patterning of Time [2] is a very strange book. That it strikes me so as a physical scientist may be neither here nor there but I should add that my psychologist acquaintances find it...