What Does a Minute Feel Like?

Photograph Courtesy Liz LigonFriends of the High Line
Photograph: Courtesy Liz Ligon/Friends of the High Line

The other day, I was a lab rat in a performance-art piece on the High Line. The artist, an Argentinian named David Lamelas, arranged forty-odd people—friends, tourists, commuters, passersby—shoulder to shoulder, like an extra-long police lineup. “The time is now six-thirty-five,” he announced, looking at his phone. Starting at one end of the queue, we were each supposed to wait for what we estimated to be one minute and then call out the time. Lamelas created the piece (called “Time”) in 1970. It was last staged at the Tate Modern, in London. Its intention, according to Lamelas, is to “reveal the subjective nature of Time.”

Isaac Newton would have had none of it. Newton was a religious man. He believed that time was absolute—marked by God’s great metronome in the sky. It was certainly not subjective. And yet Newton’s formulations of the laws of motion and universal gravitation revolutionized scientists’ understanding of time. “Newton did more than invent a way to describe motion; he invented a way to predict it,” writes Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist, in a recent book, “Time Reborn.” In the Newtonian universe, according to Smolin, “The passage of time brings no novelty or surprise, for change is just a rearrangement of the same facts.” Einstein’s theory of relativity carried this idea of time farther. Smolin again: “Relativity strongly suggests that the whole history of the world is a timeless unity; present, past, and future have no meaning apart from human subjectivity.”

If all this were true, it would mean that when Lamelas first performed “Time,” in 1970, there was in fact a way to calculate, if you were sufficiently clever, that forty-four years later he would be here, dressed in an oversized golf cap, green shorts, and mahogany wingtips, staging the piece again in Manhattan. His eyebrows would be white. People would be telling time with their cell phones, which get information from an atomic clock. An atomic clock is the world’s most accurate timekeeping device. It relies on something called a caesium oscillator. Its complexity and precision are terrifying. But leave the ferocity of the atomic clock aside. Because, while most theoretical physicists today work on the premise that there is no absolute time—that time is an illusion, that the universe is, in effect, timeless—there are dissenters, Lee Smolin among them. And Lamelas’s minute is now bearing down on me, arriving at my shoulder-neighbor, Joe Wyatt.

Wyatt is a bike messenger. He had just finished work, and was walking to the train. “I thought they were shooting a commercial,” he told me. He wore dreads, a black tank top, and baggy red shorts. He liked to people watch on the High Line, he said, “everyone in their outfits, like they’re museum exhibits.” Now the spotlight was on him. A cameraman was filming. Wyatt made a duck face, and with his arms akimbo he posed, turning left, then right. He didn’t look at his cell phone or his watch (“That’s cheating!”), and it seemed like way more than a minute had passed before he finally declared, “Seven-oh-five!”

I stiffened when the camera turned on me, wondering what I should do with my hands. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. Should I look straight at the lens? Should I smile? Should I purse my lips or suck in my cheeks? I lost count. I skipped ahead to fifteen. No one spoke. The nearby plants, wild spurge and spiked gayfeather, glowed as the sun shot light over the Hudson (light travelling at three hundred million metres a second). Sirens squealed (sound travelling at three hundred and forty metres a second) on Tenth Avenue. Where was I? Thirty-five? Forty? Time seems particularly nebulous and ungraspable when it’s all you’re focussing on. The idea that time is an illusion made perfect sense, suddenly.

“The time is now seven-oh-six,” I sang out, pretty sure that I had waited more than a minute.

Einstein once wrote, in a letter to comfort the widow of a recently deceased friend, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I sometimes take comfort in that idea myself. It’s a relief from existential angst: my life was sprayed out whole during the Big Bang, its shape already set. My consciousness is just making its way through the moments, like a finger tracing Braille.

But what if most physicists are wrong, and time is real? Smolin argues not only that time is real but that the universe “is a process for breeding novel phenomena and states of organization.” He believes that the world will get increasingly complex, that our universe is just a stage in a succession of eras, possibly analogous to natural selection in the evolution of a species.

When the last woman in Lamelas’s line called time, “Seven-sixteen,” she pumped her fist in the air. The performance had taken forty-odd people forty-one minutes. Everyone clapped, and Lamelas thanked the participants. I sat on a bench with him. “I like to see people sharing time with nothing else to do,” he said. “Usually we share coffee or drinks, but here we shared nothing but time.” He said that he had spent time earlier in the day with friends he had known for thirty-five or forty years. During the performance, he said, he thought about what time looks like physically. “You see the passage of time in your friends’ faces,” he said, squinting through the golden light.

Lamelas staged “Time” on the High Line twice more. On the second evening, he told me afterward, a child of about six approached him and asked what he was supposed to do. Lamelas explained the performance, and the boy nodded and joined the line. After the performance, the boy came back to Lamelas. “Now I understand how important one minute is,” he said. That broke Lamelas’s heart.