Earth Day ‘Tour Through Time’ to Be Sculpted on Beach

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

People rushing to catch planes care, of course, as do students frantically filling in answers to questions on timed tests.

In a broader sense, people who celebrated the millennium this year cared a great deal, too. A heated controversy continues, in fact, over whether the millennium arrived at the first tick of the clock in 2000, or whether we will have to wait until 2001--which is 2000 years after the “official” birth of Jesus.

But arguing over a single year still reflects an extremely parochial perspective. Time, after all, has been around a lot longer than planes, people, the Earth, the sun and even matter.

The real time, if truth be told, is more like a quarter past 12 billion. Years, that is. Or at least, that’s the compelling argument being made by artist Chris Hardman, director of a Sausalito theater company called Antenna. On Earth Day, April 22, Hardman is inviting the public to take the tour of “all time” on the beach near Santa Monica Pier.

Hardman started thinking about time in a big way when he read physicist Stephen Hawking’s bestseller “A Brief History of Time.” Among other things, the book explores the very beginning of time, the so-called Big Bang. The acceptance of the Big Bang as the origin of the universe, Hardman realized, means that for the first time in human history, time has a natural beginning. What’s more, he says, “we know what it is.”

And while cosmologists may argue about whether the “correct time” is 12 or 14 billion years, they’re quite sure it’s a lot more than 2001. “Two thousands years! What’s the meaning of that?” says Hardman. “There’s this immense amount of time we’re not talking about! Time doesn’t orbit the birth of Jesus any more than the sun orbits the Earth.” Celebrating only the last 2,000 years, he thinks, is dangerous because it disconnects the modern world from the rest of time. “It creates a veil” that separates us from our past.

In the scheme of things, human history is small time. The universe is the Big Time. To restore our sense of time’s true grandeur, Hardman’s performance piece, Sands of Time, takes people on a time tour of the universe. It begins at the Big Bang. Then it follows the universe as matter is born, stars turn on, galaxies form, the Earth congeals from the cinders of spent stars, life animates the planet, asteroids bombard it, dinosaurs roam. The rest is history.

The signposts for this tour through time are sculpted into the sand on the beach; people listen to a narrative through headphones as they walk. The entire unfolding history of the universe is five football fields long. Two thousand years, on the other hand, amounts to only one grain of sand. Traveling through time like this, Hardman hopes, will help people “grapple with the idea that we’re part of a large, unfolding story. It has the potential for leaving culturally based homocentric thinking behind.”

Of course, humans have known since Einstein that the time we measure on our puny clocks and watches is largely an illusion. Time speeds up and slows down, depending on how fast things are moving relative to each other--which is why a clock sent on a round-the-world journey by jet returns home running slow compared with a twin clock left sitting still on terra firma.

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Gravity also tugs on time. Time runs slower on the sun than it does on Earth; time at the edge of a black hole stands still. But much is still not known about even the simplest matters of time. For example, why does it flow one way? Why is it that we can travel left or right in space, but only in one direction through time? Space and time, as Einstein showed, are part of a single fabric of space-time. So why should time behave so differently from its partner?

Questions about the nature of time even dominated a recent meeting at Caltech on string theory. “Time is of the essence,” said physicist David Gross, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara.

“We must be able to answer the question ‘What is time?’ as simply and clearly as we answer the question ‘What is heat?’ ” said physicist Alexander Polyakov of Princeton University. While the physicists work out the answers, Hardman is getting ready to take his time tour of the first 12 billion years to the beaches of Japan. “We are the first people to know what time it is,” he says. “We think that’s worth celebrating.”