Latency

“ I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! ”

“ The delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration—but that second may be critical; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. ”

“ The crossing of letters is easily the best illustration of this type of occurrence which has the semblance of thought-communication. It is so easy to fall into the habit of delaying all delayable matters as long as possible that it must frequently happen that your own sense of duty is aroused and your correspondent's patience is exhausted at nearly the same time. If A is to hear from B, or B from A, within a period not very definite but still reasonably limited, every day's delay makes it more and more probable that their letters will cross. ”

“ The facts concerning the whole latent period and its dependence on various factors would be incomprehensible if it were assumed that no alterations whatever take place during the latent period although the stimulus is already operative. In reality, the alterations following a stimulus occur with imperceptible rapidity in the form of a molecular interchange, and the latent period is simply an expression of the fact that the primary alterations, being limited in nature, are not registered by our indicators. ”

“ For one-way signals such as television, a transmission delay of about one second obviously makes little or no difference. But for two-way conversations on the telephone, where there is rapid back-and-forth talking, even this tiny amount of time delay may be a problem. And then again, it may not be. There have been a lot of experiments to find out something about this delay problem, and these have given us a lot of different answers. Work is still going on, and there is still much to find out. In this chapter, we tell you about one small, early experiment. ”

“ When a singer is accompanying himself on the piano, keeping good time in spite of the fact that the notes are uneven in length, and meanwhile using his feet on the pedals, what has he got left to beat time with? No one has located the stimulus to which accurate time perception responds, though, in a general way, we are pretty sure that change of one sort or another is the datum. With longer intervals, from a minute to several hours, the sign of duration is probably the amount happening in the interval, or else such progressive bodily changes as hunger and fatigue. ”

“ When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or between it and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. ”

“ But now imagine that your ship and surrounding space for one mile is at a time rate 10,000 times normal, and you, in a space of one hundred feet within your ship, are affected by a time rate 1/10,000 that, or normal, due to a second, reversing field. The two fields will not fight, or be mutually antagonistic; they will merely compound their effects. Result: you will agree that you are exceeding the speed of light! ”

“ But if time, as immediate consciousness perceives it, were, like space, a homogeneous medium, science would be able to deal with it, as it can with space. Now we have tried to prove that duration, as duration, and motion, as motion, elude the grasp of mathematics: of time everything slips through its fingers but simultaneity, and of movement everything but immobility. ”

“ Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time, apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space. You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't think about that then, either.
I'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss. ”

“ Hence I leave it to others to judge, whether it be not probable that our ideas do, whilst we are awake, succeed one another in our minds at certain distances ; not much unlike the images in the inside of a lantern, turned round by the heat of a candle. This appearance of theirs in train, though perhaps it may be sometimes faster and sometimes slower, yet, I guess, varies not very much in a waking man : there seem to be certain bounds to the quickness and slowness of the succession of those ideas one to another in our minds, beyond which they can neither delay nor hasten. ”

“ Were these four strange experiences representative merely of extraordinary chance coincidences, or were they indicative of the action of some direct means of communication from mind to mind by other than the ordinary recognized channels of communication?
Personally I am satisfied that chance alone will not suffice to account for them, and that they are veritable instances of the workings of a faculty latent in all mankind and operable in accordance with a true, if as yet little understood, law of nature—call it telepathy, thought transference, or what you will. ”

“ The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. ”

“ If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That's plain enough.' He passed his hand through the space in which the machine had been. 'You see?' he said, laughing.
We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time Traveller asked us what we thought of it all. ”

“ In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity. But for the present we shall not insist upon this point; it is enough for us to have shown that, from the moment when you attribute the least homogeneity to duration, you surreptitiously introduce space. ”

“ Now, let us notice that when we speak of time, we generally think of a homogeneous medium in which our conscious states are ranged alongside one another as in space, so as to form a discrete multiplicity. Would not time, thus understood, be to the multiplicity of our psychic states what intensity is to certain of them, —a sign, a symbol, absolutely distinct from true duration? Let us ask consciousness to isolate itself from the external world, and, by a vigorous effort of abstraction, to become itself again. ”

“ The duration lived by our consciousness is a duration with its own determined rhythm, a duration very different from the time of the physicist, which can store up, in a given interval, as great a number of phenomena as we please. In the space of a second, red light,—the light which has the longest wave-length, and of which, consequently, the vibrations are the least frequent—accomplishes 400 billions of successive vibrations. ”

“ I prefer also the word expansion to space, because space is often applied to distance of fleeting successive parts, which never exist together, as well as to those which are permanent. In both these (viz. expansion and duration) the mind has this common idea of continued lengths, capable of greater or less quantities. For a man has as clear an idea of the difference of the length of an hour and a day, as of an inch and a foot. ”

“ If there be, as many of these stories seem to suggest, a latent capacity in the human mind to communicate with other minds, entirely regardless of the conditions of time and space, it is undeniable that this would be a fact of the very first magnitude. ”

“ The period of latent stimulation merely means the time after the occurrence of an excitation during which a series of physiological processes are taking place, which terminate in a contraction; so that, whether the excitation is of a strong or of a weak intensity, the period of latent stimulation is not much affected. ”

“ In the experiments I describe, the conditions were most favorable for rapidity, for the connection between the signals and their movements might almost be called innate. It is instinctive to move the hand towards a thing seen or a skin-spot touched. But where the movement is conventionally attached to the signal, there would be more chance for delay, and the amount of practice would then determine the speed. ”

“ Thus, to take the simplest case, a period of time may seem long because the kinæsthetic strain of waiting becomes intense, or because a great number of perceptions and ideas occur during its course; the strain and the number of ideas have come to mean length of time, and the primary experience of duration, so to say, drops out of sight. If, therefore, we wish our observers in the laboratory to compare periods of time; if we wish to find out accurately what durations can be grasped by the attention and held in the memory ”

“ In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being. To conceive of durations of different tensions is perhaps both difficult and strange to our mind, because we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for the true duration, lived by consciousness, an homogeneous and independent Time ”

“ But a moment of time, we repeat, cannot persist in order to be added to others. If the sounds are separated, they must leave empty intervals bet ween them. If we count them, the intervals must remain though the sounds disappear: how could these intervals remain, if they were pure duration and not space? It is in space, therefore, that the operation takes place. It becomes, indeed, more and more difficult as we penetrate further into the depths of consciousness. Here we find ourselves confronted by a confused multiplicity of sensations and feelings which analysis alone can distinguish. ”

“ Note how truthfully it carries every word intrusted to its charge, along thousands of miles of the telegraph wire, with a speed, in comparison with which, sound is a laggard, a speed that annihilates alike space and time. ”

“ To set the moment into activity, the moment threshold must be passed, and not only the intensity of the stimulations should be taken into consideration, but also the qualitative aspect of the stimuli. Ideas, emotion and feelings which apparently remain dormant at the action of one set of excitations will respond readily to the action of excitations of a different nature. ”

“ In spatial rhythms the point of division is almost always easily perceived; hence the greater difficulty of analyzing the simplest time-rhythms as compared with the most complex space-rhythms. Moreover, the basis of measurement, that by which the 'distance' between any point of division and that which follows it is determined, must, by definition, be duration of time. Suppose, however, that the time-distance between successive points of emphasis or division is equal, is the rhythm therefore necessarily regular? No, because the points of emphasis themselves may vary in force or energy. ”

“ To measure time by the state of our feelings would be as futile as an attempt to measure space by the slowness or impetuosity of our movements. Hours dwindle into minutes, and minutes are exaggerated into hours, according to the circumstances under which the mind moves on. ”

“ Leaving, then, this constant error in time-appreciation, we will pass to the variable and more palpable errors in the retrospective measurement of time. Each person's experience will have told him that in estimating the distance of a past event by a mere retrospective sense of duration, he is liable to extraordinary fluctuations of judgment. Sometimes when the clock strikes we are surprised at the rapidity of the hour. At other times the timepiece seems rather to have lagged behind its usual pace. ”