#time damage

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Thank you for the books, and for the horrifying story and for the threat upon my life

Phantom time hypothesis

At the most simple level, precarity is one consequence of the “post-Fordist” restructuring of work that began in the late 1970s: the turn away from fixed, permanent jobs to ways of working that are increasingly casualised. Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from precarity. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of “continuous professional development”; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms. For most workers, there is no such thing as the long term. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it in his book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world marked … by short-term flexibility and flux … Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection.” (30) Throughout history, humans have learned to come to terms with the traumatic upheavals caused by war or natural disasters, but “[w]hat’s peculiar about uncertainty today,” Sennett points out, “is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.”

Col. Baldwin, increasingly old, increasingly battered, ambles down Chuo-dori, arguably looking for Liquid Rooms. Deep winter. His jacket is an N-1 naval deck coat, fur collar long since frayed, size, a bit too short. “Double-double”pants, pilfered from a construction site near Ni-chome, billow out beneath, covering square-toed dress shoes; his sole concession to the date he’s supposed to keep tonight with yet another Yuka. The lookout for Liquid Rooms is not going well. The Espionage Rejects have yet to actually locate one, and whatever forecasts and precog flashes they get via the Overtones are vague, borderline hysterical, and ultimately useless. All the home office wants is hard data. So why send out the ER, who are by nature, nothing but allusive and obscure. Baldwin’s brain is long since fried too, but a kernel of discipline still remains. He’s good at managing the long term tasks, seeing what the outcomes of any given scenario might be, but minute-to-minute task fulfillment is a struggle. Psy-Ops did a number on him, pre-op experiments before the E.S.P.Y. project really began… ferocious hallucinogenic drug cocktails, leftovers and backwash, the absolute dregs of so many failed truth serums, mind control cocktails, et al. Psy-Ops were just passing time, pilfering defense budget change. They never expected to find the Overtones, the missing frequencies between oscillating standing waves. But somehow, on October 13th, 1963, Baldwin’s brain tuned into them and began receiving and broadcasting signals -- like a two-way radio -- that no human mind had held before. It manifested as hysterical laughter, which the doctors and white coats assumed was euphoria. But Baldwin knew, even then and forever after, that the moment was not transcendent. He was laughing because there was nothing out there. In the world and inside of himself.

Wilczek thought that it should be possible to construct a space-time crystal because crystals naturally align themselves at low temperatures and because superconductors also operate at very low temperatures; it seemed reasonable to assume that the atoms in such a crystal could conceivably move or rotate and then return to their natural state naturally, continually, as crystals are wont to do as they seek a lowest energy state. He envisioned a rotation with a ring of ions that flowed separately rather than as a stream, likening it to a mouse running around inside of a snake laying as a circle. The bulge would flow, rather than the snake itself spinning and would just keep on going, potentially forever. The problem was, he couldn’t figure out how such a crystal structure could be created in the real world. Taking Wilczek’s original idea, but not his method for creating a real world example, Li et al, suggest that to create a space-time crystal all that’s needed is a better ion trap. They believe that if ions could be forced using such a trap, into a ring at very low temperatures, as a superconductor, all that would be needed would be a little nudge from a tiny bit of a magnetic field to cause the ions to begin rotating as a single ring. Because there would be no resistance, and because of their natural mutual repulsion, the ring should then continue rotating indefinitely with no additional injection of energy, resulting in the space-time crystal that Wilczek imagined.

"The reason why we perceive a preferred direction has to do with the fact that it is much easier to go from a simple initial state then from a very complicated state," said Van Kolck. So time can be reversed in physics equations without affecting the result, but the effects of time reversal remain unperceivable in our everyday lives. "Until the 1960s, physicists thought that the laws of physics were exactly invariant in the transformation of time going to minus time," said Van Kolck. "Then it was discovered that there are some phenomena involving subatomic particles where there seems to be a very tiny violation of this symmetry." In other words, if you made a movie of the billiard balls and played it in reverse, the backward version actually would be a little bit different from the forward version - like a "glitch in the matrix." "It's like the process of some things happening in one direction versus the opposite one doesn't happen at the same rate," said Van Kolck. This phenomenon is known as time reversal violation. When time reversal is violated, the equation doesn't balance out; your car doesn't go as fast on the way back. It is this imbalance that physicists believe may explain the unequal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe. Since physicists first started looking for sources of time reversal violation in subatomic particles, they have been measuring properties of particles known as electric dipole moments, or EDMs. An EDM is generated by a property of subatomic particles known as spin. Spin can be visualized as a particle spinning around its center rather like the Earth rotates around its axis. With time reversal, the spin would appear to reverse, like a movie of the particle played backward. But for the equations to balance, the EDM would have to equal zero. Any non-zero value would generate a different outcome of the equations - the backward version of the movie actually would be different from the forward version.