'Time’ Center Stage at Italian Festival of Science

But last weekend, scientists at the Festival of Science in Rome gave visitors some of their time to help them understand the elusive concept of time.

 

According to this professor of psychology, developing different notions of time lets us gain different perspectives on life.

 

[Robert Levine, Ph.D, Professor of Psychology, California State University]:

“The more one learns about different ways of thinking of time, the more one has available different ways of approaching their lives, at different times, in different situations.” 

 

And no Science Festival dedicated to time would be complete without the age-old question of time travel.

 

[J. Richard Gott III, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University]:

“So if you have curved space-time, you could create a loop in time. This is the same way that Magellan’s crew went west, west, west around the earth and yet circled back and came back to Europe again even though he always went west. In the same way the time traveler, if you have space-time that’s sufficiently twisted and we can do this, maybe using cosmic strings, which is my time machine or the wormhole time machine that Kip Thorne invented. You can travel toward the future, toward the future and yet loop back and visit the past.”

 

Time travel may be fun to fantasize about, but a practical lesson on time is about being forward-looking.

 

[Andrew Howe, Athlete, Long Jump ]:

“Maybe if I had the opportunity to control the time, perhaps definitely would go back and change many, many, many things to change for humanity. But, that's okay. In short, I believe that we must always go forward to look towards the future, which I think is the most prosperous that we can do.”

 

NTD News, Rome, Italy