Music Monday ~ Time's Habit of Slip Slidin'

Following the weekend's thoughts on problems of time, quite coincidentally, I saw a question at Quora which creates a kind of musical sequel:


How do the first two verses of Paul Simon's "Slip Slidin' Away" support his premise that "the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away"?

An answer by Eamon O'Kelly (whose tag line is "You don't really care for music, do ya?")
both enlightened and confused me. He answered:

Because Paul Simon chose to illustrate Zeno’s Paradox through the medium of song.

Mr O'Kelly also provided a link about Zeno's Paradox which confused me even more, so I'll replace it with a Wikipedia page - which doesn't help me much further but is an easier read.

Best thing I can do, because it's Music Monday is to play the song!

Saturday and Sundry Problems of Time

"The problem of time may be easy to solve if we go back to the original concept of sun moving across the sky. When we measure the speed of a car, we are just comparing its motion to the motion of the hands of the clock and also indirectly to the fractional motion of sun across the sky. We are not measuring speed with something abstract called time we are just comparing a known motion (of the sun) with an unknown motion of the car."
https://www.timephysics.com/



"Aside from Velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything."
~ Dave Barry


"Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you."
~ Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"


"If you act like you've only got fifteen minutes, it will take all day. Act like you've got all day, it will take fifteen minutes.”
~ Monty Roberts


“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
~ Omar Khayyám



"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change."
~ Thomas Hardy



"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
~Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"



"It's a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up."
~ J.K. Rowling

Two to the Dozen!

Yesterday, 30 April, was the 12th anniversary of the day Anyjazz and I were wed. As is our habit we intend to celebrate with a wee trip. Date of departure has been changed more than once, due to adverse weather forecasts. Anyway - come what may, the blog will be on hold for a few days.

Another of husband's photographs, taken in a junk store recently, made it to Flickr's "Explore" section during the week:



Caption: "Past Time - If I could keep time in a bucket"

Which prompts me to recall the Jim Croce song - and how appropriate for our wedding anniversary!

"Time In A Bottle"

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you

If I could make days last forever
If words could make wishes come true
I'd save every day like a treasure and then
Again, I would spend them with you..................

This song from the 1980s kept popping into my head the other day. It's by Labi Siffre, and was about Apartheid in South Africa (Wikipedia). The lyrics could also be seen as relevant to any struggle, and I hope Labi Siffre would not object to my seeing it as relevant to the campaign of Bernie Sanders, now reaching a high point of struggle against Sec. Clinton and the DNC in the primaries still to be held. There'll be one on Tuesday in Indiana.

GO BERNIE! The higher they build their barriers the stronger you'll become....

INTERSTELLAR

We've at last seen Interstellar! I enjoyed it, for husband, "jury still out". The film's two and three-quarter hours...3 hours in our seats, including ads and previews, didn't seem over-long.

My only complaint was that some of the softly spoken dialogue was all but inaudible. My hearing is usually fine, no problems. As it's the third week of showing this movie at our 6-screen cinema, perhaps management has relegated Interstellar to the least well-equipped screening room. I have to suspect there's some local cause because I haven't come across any such complaint about sound in any review I've read since seeing the film. Whether we lost anything crucial through lack of some dialogue, I can't say. We'll probably rent the DVD in due course and find out.

I'd have benefited from more research before seeing the movie, but didn't want to know any plot details in advance, so desisted. I wish, in particular, that I'd seen this piece about the movie's spaceships before seeing the film. Even after reading it though, I'm still puzzled about one aspect.

Without giving too much away and spoiling this film for any who might still wish to see it, I'll just say that what puzzles me most wasn't involved in some of the high-fallutin' quantum physics, timey-wimey space wot-nots involved, those had to be understood by me in my own peculiar way, rightly or wrongly, but the question I still cannot answer had to do with the circular space ship Endurance, and its minor craft as described in the linked piece above. When the crew entered the wormhole discovered near Saturn, they used the smaller Ranger vehicle, while the Endurance "wheel" remained somewhere outside the wormhole's entrance. When Ranger arrives through the wormhole, into a new galaxy, Endurance is there, ready for them. Now, I might have not followed what was being said or done, or maybe I missed something (not hard to do in this movie filled with "somethings"), but in spite of spending time searching for an answer online I still haven't resolved this.

For anyone who hasn't seen the film and who doesn't intend seeing it - or for any who have seen it and would appreciate explanations, there's a very good article and commentary at
Screen Rant Interstellar Ending and Space Travel Explained
With commentary at Interstellar Spoilers Discussion.

All that said, in a nutshell Interstellar is the tale of how, when Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, due to changes in climate, inability for crops to survive, attendant lack of food, a large proportion of Earth's population already dead, a remaining branch of NASA and one visionary professor (played by Michael Caine) struggle to devise a plan for humans to save their race. This, the professor hopes will be possible by travelling outside of our Milky Way galaxy, via a wormhole discovered near planet Saturn. The hope is that there will be planets in the new galaxy capable of supporting human life. To this end NASA had already sent out a set of explorers to some possibly suitable planets. From three of those planets "pings" have been received from beacons set by three different astronauts, indicating that there might be possibilities for humans to begin colonies on those planets.

The movie's hero, ex-astronaut turned struggling farmer and widower, Cooper ("Coop"), played by Matthew McConaughey, is persuaded to head a small team to be sent to investigate the three "pinging" planets in the new galaxy to assess their viability. There's lots of other stuff going on around this point which I shall not mention. Enough to say that Cooper takes on the mission, much to the angst of his young daughter Murphy.

Matthew McConaughey, for me, made this movie enjoyable. I should also mention that director Christopher Nolan had hand a hand in it too! I said to husband on our way across the car park that had the lead part been played by someone like Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, I'd have been turned right off. McConaughey is an actor to whom I'd not paid much attention until we rented Dallas Buyers Club some months ago. His dedication in that movie, his willingness to lose so much weight (some others in the cast did too) endeared him to me, as does his Texas accent which makes me feel "at home" with him. In Interstellar he gives another excellent performance as a
father whose love for his family, and dedication (that word again) to his race (the human race), become a division of loyalties almost impossible for him to bear. He's not an over-the-top or method actor, he's a natural. He understands, I believe, from his own depths, what it is he's portraying, and how to do it best. Perhaps I should mention here that his birthday is 4 November - Sun in Scorpio.

What else? Well, there's lots of timey-wimey, spacy-wacey stuff for cinema-goers to get their heads wrapped around, which I'll not detail for two reasons - a) unwilling to spoil it for others; b) still contemplating it all myself!

Some reviewers align Interstellar with one of my all-time favourite movies 2001 A Space Odyssey. I don't see it quite in that category. Interstellar, though complex, is less mystical, more spelled out, more obviously (potentially) understandable once you get "your eye in".

There's a Dylan Thomas quotation used more than once during the movie to good effect, it's this:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Lyrics from a lovely song Starlight by Muse, an English band, floated into my mind later. I think some see the ship in the song as a ship sailing the ocean, but the song works even better about a ship sailing through space and time:

"Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations
Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations........

Far away
This ship is taking me far away
Far away from the memories
Of the people who care if I live or die

Here it is sung not by Muse but by Adam Lambert:

Fruits of Earlier Times

I read an interesting article by Ira Chernus, at Smirking Chimp, yesterday:
When Did "the '60s" Begin?

When, exactly, did the era of radical ferment we remember as "the '60s" begin? Exactly one half-century ago, PBS tells us in its recent documentary titled "1964," kicking off a year when we'll celebrate the 50th anniversary of a host of memorable events....(which Mr Chernus lists) and goes on to say "Connect the dots, the PBS show's talking head historians all say, and you'll see a year that changed America forever. "The 60s" had begun!

There's just one problem with this story: Hardly anybody in 1964 was connecting the dots.

And later

That's what historians do: look back and see things that people at the time couldn't see. It's a job well worth doing. But it's equally important that we don't confuse the early seeds of a major political, social, and cultural change with the substance of the change itself............................

Historians face a methodological problem here. If you're going to decide that the key to understanding any historical era is to track down its roots -- as '60s scholars so often do -- where do you stop? Everything that happened in 1964 -- or any other year, for that matter -- was the fruit of things that happened earlier. It's well known by now that the roots of "the '60s" really lie in the supposedly so opposite era of "the '50s."

In fact, just out of curiosity, I took a look at the year 1950, to see whether I could build a case for it as the year "the '60s" really began. It turned out to be a quick easy job. In 1950: (he lists again)

He ends with:

For historians the conclusion is this: We absolutely should trace the sources of change as far back as we can. But we should also make a clear, careful distinction between when the earliest root of any change took hold and when that change became truly significant for society at large.

For society at large the conclusion is this: Never forget how rapidly big changes, sometimes for the better, can happen. And never forget that the sources of the next big change are already gathering all around us.

While reading the article I kept thinking of a brief archived post of mine about something an astrologer had called "culture lag". It related to another way of "connecting the dots", or sometimes forgetting to do so. Here's the post:

Astrologer Bill Sheeran's article:
Generational Themes draws attention to an important point. Groups of individuals born with outer planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in similar positions are thought to have common characteristics, as a generational set. What we have to bear in mind though is that the people born into any given generational group have no perceptible effect on the world at large until they achieve adulthood. Not until some point well into adulthood will any member of a generation reach a position of influence or power (of one sort or another). Mr Sheeran calls this "culture lag".

Thus there is what I call a culture lag between the initial emergence of astrologically associated themes, and a flowering of expression of the same principles decades later. In my opinion, this explains why an author might write a book which is very much of its time, but being of its time it is inherently novel and therefore radical. It may have initial impact, and then slide out of view. But years later, many of those born when it was being written will experience a resonance the contents. Astrologically, the book and those born when it was written have something in common. The later generation ‘get it’, and the writer’s work re-emerges into popular consciousness.

I've tended to overlook this rather obvious fact at times, crediting the astrology of a certain era as significant in that era's "flavour", or in what was popular then. It must take a few decades, though, for things on the ground to catch up with what the generational planets indicated at a given time.

Mr. Sheeran ends his article thus:

This way of looking at the issues is a bit simplistic - there are many inter-related factors involved in unravelling the picture. But I do think it is important, especially in mundane or collective level astrology work, to bear in mind this culture lag aspect of astrological dynamics. Apart from anything else it helps to make sense of the tensions which can arise between generations. Or illuminate political dynamics.

“The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.”
~ Patrick Rothfuss, "The Wise Man's Fear"

The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not.... ~Thomas Carlyle.

Future Tense

A couple of off the wall thoughts upon which to ponder - if one dares.

"The internet is a new lifeform that shows the first signs of intelligence". So says brain scientist and serial entrepreneur Jeff Stibel. He argues that the physical wiring of the internet is much like a rudimentary brain and some of the actions and interactions that take place on it are similar to the processes that we see in the brain.

I've thought before that we are actually computers originally constructed by some highly evolved beings aeons ago. This idea kind of feeds into that...kind of...

See the brief video at this link. I find the presenter's rather obsessive passion for his subject a tad scary though.

How long before we have our own version of "Hal" dictating to us?

AND

A comment beneath an article at Huffington Post at the weekend proved more interesting to me than the rather old news contained in the article about time travel. Part of comment from commenter "cp35":

...........General Relativity is as old as 1919 I think. You want something that is also old but that will probably be bigger news to those who don't know or understand Physics? Because light is indeed going at the speed of light (time stops completely at the speed of light), and light from the beginning of the Universe is still traveling, the past still exists in some time frame. Indeed, the future also already exists. And that is profoundly more mind blowing, because we experience the past as no longer there and the future as still having to come, but that is not really the case.

I suppose that seers and clairvoyants, through the ages, have always known this.

Postscript: I don't know, anymore, what there is to say about mass shootings, as yet another one blots the scene in the USA.

"Funny How Time Slips Away"?~Time Slip # 2

Following yesterday's theme, another oft-repeated time slip story, this from 1979. It was also featured in a British TV series Strange But True. Highlighted words are my own thoughts. Astro chart for the date and time the occurence began is at the end of this account. The exact location of these happenings in France isn't known, so I've used Bourges, a mid-country location, to discover where the planets would have been on that date at that time of the evening.

Coincidentally this is yet another event which is said to have taken place in France, as did yesterday's time slip feature... as well as the fictional events in the movie Midnight in Paris.

In October 1979, two couples in Dover on the south coast of England, set off on a vacation together, intending to travel through France and Spain.

Geoff and Pauline Simpson and their friends Len and Cynthia Gisby travelled by boat across the English Channel to the coast of France. They then rented a car and proceeded to drive north. (I don't understand why they'd drive north if heading for Spain - or anywhere in France really!) Around 9:30 that evening, October 3, they began to tire and looked for a place to stay. They pulled off the autoroute to a decent-looking hotel.

Len went inside and in the lobby encountered a man dressed in an odd plum-colored uniform. The man said they were fully booked, but there was a small hotel south along the road. Len thanked him and he and his companions went on. (Some versions of the story indicate that this first hotel was a known, named, establishment the party had picked as a stop-over place. The version used here indicates "something not quite right" about it, and doesn't mention it as having been a pre-planned stop.

They were struck by the oddness of the cobbled, narrow road and the buildings they passed. They also saw posters advertising a circus. "It was a very old-fashioned circus," Pauline would remember. "That's why we took so much interest."

A long, low building with a row of brightly lit windows came into view. Some men were standing in front of it and when Cynthia spoke with them, they told her the place was an inn, not a hotel. (How much French did the visitors speak ? - I had understood that it was minimal) They drove further down the road until they saw two buildings: one a police station, the other an old-fashioned two-story building bearing a sign marked "Hotel." Inside, everything was made of heavy wood. There were no tablecloths on the tables, nor was there any evidence of such modern conveniences as telephones or elevators.

The bedrooms were also strange. No glass in the windows - just wooden shutters. Beds had heavy calico-like sheets, no pillows. No locks, only wooden catches on the doors. The bathroom the couples had to share had old-fashioned plumbing. (No direct mention of the loo (lavatory). I find this strange. Was it an earth closet, in an out-house? This would have been a very very strong clue that something was seriously wrong. It'd be highly unlikely for a water closet to be available in rural France, if time had slipped back to early 1900s as later indicated, yet no mention seems to have been made of this.)

After they'd eaten, they returned to their rooms and fell asleep. Next morning they returned to the dining room and ate a simple breakfast with "black and horrible" coffee, Geoff recalled. (Some versions of the story state that they were served steak, egg and fried potato) As they were sitting there, a woman wearing a silk evening gown and carrying a dog under her arm sat opposite them. "It was strange," Pauline said. "It looked like she had just come in from a ball but it was seven in the morning. I couldn't take my eyes off her."

At that point, two gendarmes entered the room. "They were nothing like the gendarmes we saw anywhere else in France," according to Geoff. "Their uniforms seemed to be very old." The uniforms were deep blue and the officers were wearing capes over their shoulders. Their hats were large and peaked.

Despite the oddities, the couples enjoyed themselves and, when they returned to their rooms, the two husbands separately took pictures of their wives standing by the shuttered windows.

On their way out, Len and Geoff talked with the gendarmes about the best way to take the autoroute to Avignon and the Spanish border. The officers didn't seem to understand the word "autoroute," and the travellers assumed they hadn't pronounced the French word properly. The directions they were given were poor; they led to an old road some miles out of the way. They decided to use the map instead and take a more direct route along the highway.

After the car was packed, Len went to pay his bill and was astonished when the manager asked only for 19 francs. Assuming there was some misunderstanding, Len explained that there were four of them and they had eaten a meal. The manager only nodded. Len showed the bill to the gendarmes, who smilingly indicated there was nothing amiss. He paid in cash and left before they could change their minds.

On their way back from two weeks in Spain, the two couples decided to stop at the hotel again. They had had a pleasant, interesting time there and the prices certainly couldn't be beat. The night was rainy and cold and visibility poor, but they found the turnoff and noticed the circus signs they had seen before, and decided this was the same road they'd travelled before. It was, but there was no hotel alongside it. Thinking that somehow they had missed it, they went back to the first hotel where, on their earlier journey a man in a plum-colored suit had given them directions. That hotel was there, but there was no man in the unusual suit and the clerk denied such an individual working there.

The couples drove three times up and down the road looking for that old hotel, but began to realize it really was was no longer there. They drove north and spent the night in a hotel in Lyons. Room with modern facilities, breakfast and dinner cost them 247 francs.

Back in Dover, Geoff and Len had their rolls of film processed. The photos of the hotel (one by Geoff, two by Len) were in the middle of the rolls. When they got the prints back, those taken inside the hotel were missing, even though each film had its full quota of negatives, and prints, none spoiled. It was as if the pictures had never been taken, except for one detail that a reporter for Yorkshire Television noticed much later: "There was evidence that the camera had tried to wind on in the middle of the film. Sprocket holes on the negatives showed damage."

The couples didn't mention their strange experience to many others for three years, telling it only to friends and family. One friend found a book in which it was revealed that gendarmes wore the uniforms described prior to 1905. Eventually, a reporter for the Dover newspaper heard about it and published an account. Later, a TV dramatization of the experience was produced by a local station.

In 1985, Manchester psychiatrist Albert Keller hypnotized Geoff Simpson to see if he could recall any more of the peculiar event. Under hypnosis he added nothing new to what he had remembered.

Jenny Randles, a British writer who investigated this bizarre episode, wonders, "What really happened to the four travellers in rural France? Was this a timeslip? If so, one wonders why the hotel manager was apparently not surprised by their futuristic vehicle and clothing, and why he accepted their 1979 currency, which certainly would have appeared odd to anybody living that far back in the past."

The two couples have no explanation. "We only know what happened," says Geoff.

Information from "World of Strange Phenomena" by Charles Berlitz, published 1988 by Wynwood Press (VIA: http://timeslipaccounts.blogspot.com/2009/04/well-leave-speed-of-light-on-for-you.html)

OTHER QUIBBLES ~~

The matter of the hotel keeper accepting modern money without question is curious, but a case could be made that these were foreign tourists in rural France - the hotel keeper might have thought that the notes were some newly designed currency not yet seen in his isolated part of the country. Regarding the modern car driven by the visitors: likewise, I guess - though less believable.

The gendarmes' uniform: from photos and illustrations I've seen online it'd seem that the headgear (the képi), hasn't changed a great deal since the early 1900s, and whether a cape is worn probably depends on weather conditions. Uniforms are still dark navy blue. I can imagine uniforms the tourists saw looking slightly different from those seen elsewhere, because this, again, could be due to the rural location where the guys, in 1979, had not quite caught up with the other areas of France. Photo below showing present-day gendarme uniforms, from a 2011 blog Kathy in Paris


Here's an astrological chart for the date and time this strange "event" began, set for a location in mid-France, at 9:30 PM.

Neptune (illusion, dreams, delusion, creativity imagination)was on the descending angle - one of the strongest positions in a chart. The astro "atmosphere" was ripe for illusion, then.

I find the travellers' tale more than a wee bit suspect to be honest. I can easily see how these tourists might have stayed overnight in a rather old-fashioned run-down roadside hotel in the middle of nowhere, then conjured up a tall tale to tell their friends back home. Once the story leaked out they'd have needed to further embellish it...and stick to it, especially after press and TV got wind of it!

A straight time slip, for a few moments or even lasting an hour or so, I could accept as a mysterious but not impossible experience. Contact between parties on either side of the time-slippage is the sticking point for me. For me believe stories of this kind of experience, it'd have to be described as a "viewing only" kind of event. But a happening such as these travellers described, stretching overnight, with plenty of contact between parties on each side of the time slip? Very hard to believe, much as I'd love to do so. Sorry!

More tomorrow.

"A place where there's no space or time"? Time Slip#1

Yesterday's post described the movie Midnight in Paris - a plot which centres on a time warp or, I find now, the more commonly used term is time slip. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris isn't the first movie to latch onto this fascinating premise of course. Portrait of Jenny & Somewhere in Time are two others we've seen fairly recently on DVD or on Turner Classic Movie channel. Several novelists have used time slippage as anchor for their storylines. Wikipedia has a list of examples: see the section "Time slips in popular culture", towards the end of the page.

While searching for something else online I happened upon an article touching on time slips. Then, having spent a couple of hours just reading many websites and blogs where real life experiences of time slips are described, I became intrigued. I'm going to describe one of these here and others in future posts. Anything appearing to be enhancement, frills or suspect moss gathered in multiple re-tellings of the stories will be questioned! I'll look at any relevant astrological factors where dates and times are available.

First up, the story which is repeated most often on blogs and websites featuring time slips. This happened so long ago that reading about it now seems almost like a double-dip time slip!

It was 10 August 1901 (in reality). Two English women in France visit Versailles: Annie Moberly (55), Principal of St. Hugh's College in Oxford and Dr. Eleanor Frances Jourdain (38) a teacher. A little on the ladies' backgrounds from here:

Annie Moberly 10th of 15 children, was the daughter of an Oxford don who became the Bishop of Salisbury in England. She was well educated, honorable, religious, imaginative. She became a teacher and was appointed the 1st principal of St. Hugh's College, a small school for girls, in Oxford.

Eleanor Jourdain was also the daughter of a parson and the 1st of 10 children. Although descended from a Huguenot family, she was thoroughly British. She was introspective and prim, yet fanciful and independent as well. She published 7 weighty textbooks, one on symbolism in Dante. She, too, set out to teach, held several positions, ran a school of her own, and after her adventure in France was to become vice-principal of St. Hugh's College under the older Annie Moberly.

In 1901, Eleanor Jourdain, eager to learn French, had moved to Paris temporarily, where she was sustaining herself by tutoring English children in that city. Annie Moberly, who at that time knew Miss Jourdain only slightly, came over to Paris to enjoy a short vacation and to offer Miss Jourdain the post of vice-principal at St. Hugh's. The 2 teachers became good friends and began taking trips outside Paris. Neither had ever been to Versailles, and they decided to go by train to visit its historic palace and beautiful grounds.

And so the adventure began:

They "did" the Palace of Versailles then decided to go find the Petit Trianon (right) - a "small" château located on the grounds of the Palace . Wikipedia tells that it was built by order of Louis XV for his long-term mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and was constructed between 1762 and 1768. Madame de Pompadour died four years before its completion, it was subsequently occupied by her successor, Madame du Barry. Upon his accession to the throne in 1774, the 20-year-old Louis XVI gave the château and its surrounding park to his 19-year-old Queen Marie Antoinette for her exclusive use and enjoyment. Marie longed to escape Louis and his court, and he gave her just the place.

The two ladies, having taken a wrong turning somewhere, were unable to find the Petit Trianon. With nothing available as a guide, they were lost. Both reported later that they began to experience a heavy mood, a dampening of their previously high spirits. They asked for directions from two men who passed by dressed in "long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats". They then passed an isolated cottage; a woman and an adolescent girl were in the doorway. The woman held a jug, the girl reached towards it. Dr. Jourdain wrote later, "She might have been just going to take the jug or have just given it up I remember that both seemed to pause for an instant, as in a motion picture."

Next the ladies came upon a pavilion. Again they noticed an unpleasantly depressing atmosphere. A man, face marked by smallpox, sat outside the pavilion, but did not acknowledge the presence of the two women in any way.

They then passed a small house, with terraces and shuttered windows. A fair-haired lady, unusually dressed, was seated on the grass in front of the house studying what appeared to be a drawing on a large piece of paper. There was a second house at the end of the terraces. As the two English women neared the houses a door opened then slammed shut. A young male, possibly a servant, appeared. Our two visitors, suspecting they may be trespassing, followed the young man towards the Petit Trianon. Then....in the next moment.... suddenly found themselves in the midst of a wedding party, dressed in the current style - 1901.

On their return home the two women pondered over their strange experience in Versailles. Had they seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette - or had they stumbled telepathically upon an abandoned memory of hers, or...was it a time slip? Miss Moberly, in the course of some research, found an illustration of
Marie Antoinette by the artist Wertmüller. To the ladies' amazement it showed the same woman, wearing the very clothes, they had seen near the Petit Trianon.
The outfit, as described (here) "a summer dress with a long bodice and a very full, apparently short skirt, which was extremely unusual. She had a pale green fichu or kerchief draped around her shoulders, and a large white hat covered her fair hair", doesn't match any portrait by Wertmüller I can find online. That shown right is the best known painting of Marie Antoinette by the artist. It's not imposssible that there are others illustrating old bound volumes of course.

Dr Jourdain went back to Versailles the next winter, but found it impossible to retrace their 1901 path, the grounds appeared strangely changed from the way she remembered.

Further research brought forth the information that on October 5, 1789 Marie Antoinette had been sitting at the Petit Trianon when she first learned that a mob from Paris was marching towards the palace gates. Dr Jourdain and Miss Moberly surmised that Marie Antoinette's memory of this terrifying moment could have lingered there through time, and the two ladies had inadvertently walked into its echo.

Possible explanations - and my own quibbles:

After drafting this post I found yet abother website with a long account of the two ladies' adventure in Versailles. See here under section: The Trianon Adventure. There several possible explanations are put forward, mainly based on the fact that it was known that certain people were in the habit of frequenting the area around Petit Trianon in the costume of the era of the French Revolution - for their own peculiar reasons. One woman was known to have dressed as Marie Anoinette. None of that is capable of disproving completely the ladies' story, but several spokes are put in the wheel (as it were).

Logically I can see no reason for these two ladies, in 1901, to have fabricated the story deliberately. What did two respected teachers stand to gain? Nowadays they might be able to publish a book or two on the back of their experience, and a lecture tour, maybe a few appearances on late-night chat shows - but in 1901....?

On the other hand....

Both women were of good education, with ready knowledge of historical events. It's not out of the question that, having become lost in the palace grounds, on a sultry August afternoon they fell into a kind of dreamy play-acting mode - decided the tale they came up with to pass the time while trying to find their way was too good a story to forget. It would have been repeated many times, no doubt expanded and embroidered with each telling. I notice, for instance, that the ladies said they were able to ask directions of the first two men (in strange garb) they encountered, yet other people they saw seemed to be unaware of their presence. Some renditions of the story vary slightly too, depending on where you read it.

Out of curiosity I looked at a chart for 10 August 1901, Versailles. At noon Moon in the last degrees of Gemini was conjunct Neptune at 00 degree Cancer....I'm not sure whether this is relevant or not, but the "atmosphere" in early afternoon would have been ripe for imagination and creativity! Just sayin'!


PS: Title of post comes from the lyrics of Leon Russell's lovely "A Song For You"

WEEKEND GRAB BAG ~ TIME

Some detail from a book by Robert FitzGerald: Signs of the Times are available via the link. The author divides astrological Ages into more accessible bite-sized chunks called Eras and Phases.

At present we are in transit through the Age of Pisces. By this author's calculation the Aquarius Era of the Pisces Age ran from 1800 to 1980 - which could well account for some astrolgers' insistence that we were already in the Age of Aquarius.

Then, dividing time into even smaller slices, 1950 to 1965 becomes the Aquarius Phase of the Aquarius Era of the Age of Pisces....that slice includes the psychedlic 60s - thought to be quite Aquarian, so with a double dose of Aquarius: phase and era, it was.... with a background of Pisces dreaminess.

1965 to 1980 = Pisces Phase, Aquarius Era, Age of Pisces.

From 1980 to 2160 is the Pisces Era of the Age of Pisces and we are presently in the Gemini Phase - 2010 to 2025 of the Pisces Era of the Age of Pisces.

The Cancer Phase will be 2025 to 2040.

For a brief rundown on what this means, and comparisons with similar eras and phases throughout history, do take a look at the website, linked above.

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p.10)

From http://www.timephysics.com/

MEASURING TIME

Be it money, weight, a piece of estate, speed, distance or resistance. We measure by comparison to a standard that we have defined. When we measure a mass we use a standard mass like KG or LB for comparison. Distances we measure using a standard of length like a meter yard or feet. Keeping the above in mind let us think how we measure motion. We use time to measure motion i.e. Feet per second or miles per hour. This provides a hint that when dealing with time we are actually dealing with some standard of motion.

We may have made the concept of time more complicated then what it really is. Measurement of time started early on in human development. There are plenty of clues in every language in the greetings and the meetings. Time of the day is related to the position of sun in the sky or its absence thereof. There is dawn, sunrise, early morning, morning, mid morning, noon, afternoon, late afternoon, evening, sunset, dusk, night and mid night. Then there are years, months, weeks, based on earth’s yearly orbit around the sun and the changing seasons. The use of units like seconds and minutes which are radial angle measurements in geometry points toward the original connection of time measurements to radial motion of astronomical objects across the sky. Once we started using clocks, watches, and then digital time we got completely disconnected from the original method of measurement and time developed a life of its own.

The problem of time may be easy to solve if we go back to the original concept of sun moving across the sky. When we measure the speed of a car, we are just comparing its motion to the motion of the hands of the clock and also indirectly to the fractional motion of sun across the sky. We are not measuring speed with something abstract called time we are just comparing a known motion (of the sun) with an unknown motion of the car.

Time is making fools of us again. ~J.K. Rowling

One from a list of crazy watches;
Relativity watch
Modeled on Einstein's theory of relativity, this Relativity Watch actually makes the numbers move instead of the hands. This, of course, makes you dizzy if you continuously stare at it for more than 12 hours.

(A thought: The movement of this watch somehow seems more akin to the movement of the planets.)

Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.
— Dave Barry

The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

(Rabindranath Tagore).