Living on the Edge of the Fringe

I'm a musician, a cellist. I've been playing cello for more decades than I care to admit. About two years ago, I treated myself to a new cello, replacing the instrument I got in fourth grade. Heidi, my new cello's name, has been a renaissance for me. Suddenly, I can play music I wouldn't even attempt with my old cello. My personal motto could now be: A day without Heidi is like a day without sunshine. I practice at least an hour a day, and sometimes, if I go to an orchestra rehearsal, I might spend three or more hours with her on a given day. That's as much as some people spend in front of their televisions!

My current project is to learn the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 to be the rehearsal cellist for an actual performance of the music. I won't be doing the actual performance, however, I will be soloing during orchestra rehearsals so the musicians can understand how the orchestra and cello solo combine.

The last movement of the concerto is blazingly fast, with the half note having a metronome marking of 88. Of course, being a modern piece, not much of it "falls under the fingers," and I have to rehearse very carefully to play the right notes at the right speed. Yesterday, I decided it was time for the metronome, to give me my speed goal. When I set it to 88 (176, actually, so I can hear the quarter notes), it was ticking away very fast. Fortunately, the last movement starts with quarter notes, then moves to eighth notes, and then sixteenths.

As I went through the movement, I found I was able to keep up with the metronome. It didn't seem to be that fast to me. Doing this requires extreme concentration. It's an interesting feeling. I lose all sense of myself and surroundings. I think I even lose sense of the notes and it all comes down to music. If I get distracted even in the slightest, it all falls apart.

So, there I am, just me, metronome, and music. I was keeping the beat until the end of the section, and when I stopped I heard a very strange thing: the metronome seemed to speed up. I did this several times, playing with great concentration, but when I stopped, the beating of the metronome sped up very noticeably. It's an electronic metronome, it's digital. There is no cause for the metronome to speed up or slow down without adjusting it. So, this variable speed must not be the metronome, it has to be my perception of the metronome.

This is not surprising. To us mortals, time is very subjective. When we are engaged, time speeds by. If we are laboring on a boring task, the individual seconds can seem interminable. I believe everybody has the ability to concentrate to the extent that nothing seems to exist except the task at hand. Just look at a kid with an X-Box (yes, they are all kids, if you see an X-Box, there's a kid at the other end, regardless of age). The kid is totally zoned out.

Of course, it makes me wonder. When I'm concentrating on the music and time subjectively slows, I wonder what part of time is slowing. Is it my perception of time? Are the processes in my brain speeding up resulting in my perception of the slower passage of time? Or, most intriguingly, is our concentration putting us in a different time, with different rules? Is it possible for us to control the actual passage of time?

This last suggestion is difficult, if not impossible to prove. Even if we somehow inserted a clock in our braincases, I'm not certain it would record a different time flow. Clocks are not really about time anyway. They measure phenomena (like a flywheel going clock-wise then counter clock-wise [pun intended], or the vibration of a quartz crystal, or the atomic decay of a radioactive element) and through mechanical or electronic means, translate it to some sort of time reading.

Our perception of time sucks, at least compared to a clock. If somebody locked us in a room with no clocks in view, no windows, or anything to mark the passage of time, I really think any guess involving how long we were locked in that room would be way wrong. We rely too much on our time pieces, on the height of the sun in the sky, or any number of time cues to develop anything close to an objective sense of time.

So, do we have the power to alter the passage of time? I think we may, and I think it has to do with living on the edge of the fringe. Here's my reasoning:

One of my favorite lines as a college chemistry teacher was: When you get really small, really fast, or really cold, things get really weird.

Albert Einstein predicted that time slows down when you travel faster. If you get to light speed (186,000 miles/sec), time, as measured by clocks, stops. Currently, the speed of light is an absolute, nothing can go faster, at least at present (another bizarre concept when you are discussing changing the passage of time, what is present?). The speed of light is fringe, it's the edge of the fringe.

About the smallest you can get is to the subatomic level, you know, electrons, protons, neutrons, and others. The size of these particles is at the edge of the fringe again. Nothing gets smaller. Well, an electron, for example, has completely weird behavior. Compare an electron to a baseball. You can hold a baseball, and while you are holding it, you know exactly where it is: in your hand. Electrons aren't that cooperative. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal states that you can't know the exact position and direction of an electron at the same time. It may have something to do with the fact that it is phasing in and out of existence so fast. The Josephson Junction, widely used in electronics exploits this very weird characteristic of electrons. Believe it or not, electrons can penetrate barriers that they shouldn't. It's like they phase out of existence on one side of the wall, and phase in on the other side. So, we say that electrons are discontinuous, they are not all here. Some of the time, they just disappear.

And, believe it or not, you and I are phasing in and out of existence, too. Strictly speaking, we are discontinuous. The good news is that our harmonic frequency (related to our mass) is so high that for all intents and purposes, we are continuous. So, if you think you can disappear long enough to re-appear on the other side of the bank vault wall, you might have difficulties putting this into practice.

The coldest you can get is absolute zero. We define heat as molecular vibration. Yeah, molecules vibrate, we can measure their vibration frequencies. The bonds holding the atoms together act like springs and they can spring in and out, and side to side. At absolute zero, -459 degrees F, all molecular vibration stops. You can't get colder than that. But, at the edge of this fringe, some materials become superconducting, able to conduct electricity with no resistance at all. This is a real effect, indeed, those MRI machines that allow doctors to see inside of us, use a superconducting magnet.

OK, so we aren't really fast, really small, or really cold enough to be really weird. We don't live on those fringes. But, consider yourself. As living, breathing creatures, we are miracles. Every part of us, our kidneys, intestines, blood, organs, brain, skin represent the highest order of molecular organization. Our brains, for example, have an organization, a structure that we cannot begin to understand. This organization, this structure has incredible power. When pushed to the edge of the fringe, our brains, our wills, can cure us of cancer, lift huge weights, create incredible inventions, stories, lives.

I really think the miracle of our bodies can alter the passage of time. I really think this is the beginning of the ways we can influence our environment, indeed, create new environments. We all have ways to achieve levels of concentration where our worlds change, where the rules we live by bend. All we need is to live on the edge of the fringe of our abilities.