the discreteness of time

most of the time we experience time as a continuous flow. our perceptual systems blend input from the five senses into a continuum we call reality. there is a lot of work done on this reality before we have a conscious apprehension of it, and this allows for all kinds of interesting coloration of reality. it also allows you to train your perception to see different realities. consider what I call the matador effect, which was popularized by a series of American television ads in the late 1960s. until your attention has been drawn to a particular vehicle (in this case the amc matador)

our experience isn’t evenly distributed. like heartbeats, subjective time runs at all different speeds.

clocks are devices that measure out discrete movements of time. in fact, clockworks are explicitly designed to release some force in the smallest possible steps. the smallest unit of discrete time we know is a second, which as it happens approximates the resting rate of our heartbeats.

seconds are driven by the smallest possible movement of a spring being released or a weight dropping towards earth. the clockmaker’s art is a balance of the precision of each aperture of time and the smallness of the movement. both a practical matters. a clock with metering seconds inconsistently or inaccurately is useless, and a clock that needs constant attention (be it winding or lifting the weights) is annoying. the smaller the movement the less frequently the clock needs to be tended.

SECONDS ARE AN EFFICIENT INCREMENT OF TIME FOR A CLOCK’S SPRING…

seconds are discrete steps. each tick of the clock advances the second hand one step. these discrete movements continue precisely enough to make the measurement of larger blocks of time possible. seconds are well understood. I’m sure everyone is able to count out ten seconds accurately enough by imagining the tick-tock of a clock or saying ‘thousand’ between every count. clocks are precise enough so they may be autonomous. consider the clocks in various train stations and how they are assumed to all be meting out the same time. they are synchronized well enough to build time-tables and knowing when the train is running late (or more rarely when it is running on time). seconds are a part of our perception. we understand the world in seconds, but rarely in anything smaller.

what about electric clocks with the second hand moves steadily? even here there is a discrete movement, though it is microscopic. electrical current is being applied to a quartz crystal, and it is throbbing at 60 cycles per second. now the clock’s second hand is moving in clicks 1/60 long–short enough to be perceived as continuous. the throbbing of the quartz crystal happens quickly enough that we perceive it not as a click but as a tone. interestingly, it’s easier for us to perceive the variation in a tone than variations between clicks of a second: the very elongation of time which makes it possible to perceive discrete clicks makes it impossible to perceive the continuum which is a tone–even though they are the same as far a reality is concerned. so the space between clicks may be under- or over-loaded, and so the density of our experience of reality.

when do clicks become a tone? this is related to the question about whiskers and beards. there is no discrete moment when one becomes the other, though it is obvious on either side of the line. try taking whiskers away from what you just said was barely a beard and you’ll see what I mean.

here begins the debate about subjectivity, perception, and reality. if our experience of the world is composed of processed bits of senses, then a layer of culture has already invaded our perception of the world. once we know the shape of the amc matador we start to see them everywhere. the matador, once known, causes a change in the patterns we see. our visual agenda has been extended, and now we see matadors. given a world that contains matadors, we have changed, the world is the same.

[the amc matador is a pattern which is added to our perceptual agenda. the cultural part of this is agreeing on what constitutes a pattern.]

what does this have to do with clocks? clocks measure strings of discrete durations we know as seconds. seconds are a cultural phenomena in the same way as the matador. they stand as discrete moments on the edge of the more continuous world of tones and music. quartz clocks exist in both the discrete and continuous worlds, you could say that they make discrete steps out of 60 cycle tones. you could even go so far as to say that quartz clocks rescue the discrete from the continuous.

[another essay about discrete time putting order to chaos; the governance of nature, lasers in the jungle, etc.]

film walks the same line as quartz clocks. “persistence of vision” exists just over the line from the perception of individual images into the whir of reality. after much experimentation by Edison and others that number was standardized at 24 frames per second. the images appear to move continuously (just like reality) and the projector mechanism (itself a kind of clockworks) sounds continuous, but the whole affair is really putting 24 still frames on the screen each second. the shutter opens, each frames stops in the gate, the shutter closes and the claw yanks the next frame into the gate. repeat 24 times per second for the duration of the film.

[video is a different beast which addresses the same concern of creating persistence of vision through different means. video is more quartz clock than tick-tock. details...]

yes, perception tends to blur these discrete images, but cinema’s power to render what we call reality is a cultural construction. this effect has become so pervasive in our age that film imagery has taken over our memory itself. our perception of the world is cinematic. to a greater or lesser degree our reality is cinematic.
A film of a clock ticking in “real time” highlights its convention.