Awesome Time

We always thought about time in very linear terms. However, scientists have theorized that the past, present, and future simultaneously exist. Kurzgesagt explores the theory that the entire history of the universe has already happened, and we’re just experiencing our tiny sliver of it. Warning: your brain might hurt after watching this.

Time isn’t as simple as what shows up on your phone’s screen. Erin McCarthy of Mental Floss offers up a number of interesting tidbits about the nature of time, how humans perceive its passage, how space and time relate, and the different ways of measuring time itself.

Christopher Nolan loves to play with time in his films. Movies like Memento, Inception, Dunkirk, and Tenet each take advantage of the nature of time to tell stories and make audiences use their brains. Nerdstalgic’s film essay delves into Nolan’s effective manipulation of time throughout his filmography.

This clever online clock by The Pudding automatically plays songs with the current time in the title. While we’ve heard of 12:51 by The Strokes and 10:15 Saturday Night by The Cure, we had no idea there were so many other time-titled tunes out there. The album art on the turntable is a neat idea, too.

After building a scale model of the Solar System, filmmakers Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet headed to the Mojave desert to create a physical model that illustrates time over 13.8 billion years. They dotted the dry lakebed with lights and combined those with video footage to show the passage of time. Download a printable version of their time scale here.

Nerdforge has impressed us with their amazing PC case builds and bookbinding. In this video, Martina ponders how to determine the optimal time to spend on a project by painting the same scene over three different periods. Is there a point of diminishing returns, or do things just keep getting better?

The Eone Switch is a wristwatch that doesn’t require vision to check the time. It uses two rotating ball bearings to indicate the current hour and minute, enabling those with visual impairments to tell the time with touch. This new model features interchangeable tactile faceplates and includes two in the package.

You might think of the passage of time as something that moves in a particular direction – from left to right, front to back, or clockwise around a dial. As MinuteEarth explains, there’s no uniform way of looking at the direction of time, and how humans even represent it differently based on the way their language is written.

Everything you’re watching and reading has already happened – even if it was just a few seconds ago. It’s Okay To Be Smart gets really deep with an exploration of how time is relative, and therefore experienced differently for each person depending on their place in the universe.

Ever wonder why we add a day to the end of every fourth February? Well, as it turns out, the Earth orbits the sun every 365.242 days, so we get off by about a quarter day every year. Dr. James O’Donoghue provides a concise graphical explanation of this time tweak we do to make things right, and what would happen without leap years.

(PG-13: Language) “Science is just magic that works.” exurb1a talks us through the strange science that explains how two pickles placed apart from each other have actually traveled through time at infinitesimally different speeds. Stick around until the end and you might actually learn a thing or two about physics.

If you ever had to explain the Earth’s timekeeping method to an alien civilization, you might find it challenging. As Minute Physics explains, what we call a day isn’t exactly what most of us think. For a more detailed explanation, the What Is a Day interactive lab is worth checking out.

Veritasium explores our ability to sync up images with sounds, even if they arrive at different times. Along the way, we learn how there’s a brief window of time that that we think of as the present, during which our brains can instantaneously alter our perceptions.