2007, Animation, 20 minutes

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the Hubble Deep Field team.

 

A deep field for the time deaf consists of an animation made from a photograph taken by the Hubble Deep Field team. The animation comprises a long shot of a section of the night sky developing over half an hour. It is derived from the length of time it takes the light from distant stars to reach us, that by the time we see them many stars have ceased to exist. Initially blackness is dominant and one or two twinkling stars appear, gradually more stars emerge from the darkness and dot the field of view. Finally tiny galaxies and pulsars start to appear and a vivid coloured palette of stellar activity fills the screen. Powerfully contemplative, the film is a reminder that while we may experience our own lives in terms of the present moment, the only time we can see into the past is when we are looking at the night sky. 

 

“In the animation A deep field for the time deaf, time measures distance, light traveling the path of least time. We wait in blackness for the light traveling nearly 3 hundred million meters per second to reach us from distant objects. First we see stars that are in our own galaxy and then we begin to see further – out to galaxies that are millions of light years away. Then we see the furthest, oldest objects whose light has been able to reach us in the entire age of the universe – early galaxies formed roughly a billion years after the big bang. We are seeing these galaxies as they looked in the past. We are separated from these islands of hundreds of billions of stars by vast distances in space and in time.” Janna Levin, Time moves on.

 

“Some few people are born without any sense of time. As consequence, their sense of place becomes heightened to excruciating degree. They lie in tall grass and are questioned by poets and painters from all over the world. These time-deaf are beseeched to describe the precise placement of trees in the spring, the shape of snow on the Alps, the angle of sun on a church, the position of rivers, the location of moss, the pattern of birds in a flock. Yet the time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.“ Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams.

Exerpt taken from Cherry Blossom Time by Francis McKee