Material Flux Timepiece
In exploring the fluctuations in materials after the effects of water, fire, traffic, or time, I have come to admire the slow effacing of wood, marble, metal, candles, etc. This flux, or creep, is evident in the roads we drive on, the squeaky chairs we sit on, the sidewalk cracks we walk on, shiny plastic of our keyboard (that started out matte). In a city as old as New York, a cursory stroll through one of the boroughs yields countless examples of creep. One of my favorites to notice is the slow sloping of marble stairs. Imagine how much foot traffic has to rub these steps in order for it to just wear away, or someone is wearing some uncomfortable shoes.
This slow process is made most comical by the Pitch Clock, a slow and otherworldly lethargic material, bitumen. It takes about a decade for one drop to fall, and, since 1927, has only let 8 of them free. Do read more about it, utterly fascinating.
I teamed up with Yin Ho and Andrea Wolf to represent this phenomenon. We were immediately drawn to actualizing creep through the dripping of a colored liquid on soft wood. It seemed that for our time frame, one week, we could maximize our results with a gentle tweak of our resources. Building our contraption was a fairly straightforward task: a wooden box and shield, an IV drip, food color, and some balsa wood.
Yin proposed we use a light orange as the color, mixing in reds and yellows to achieve our color, which looked like morning urine. I wanted something dark and visible like a deep blue or blue green. I figured we would be able to locate striated, grained color better by having a darker hue. As you can see, the orange turned out magnificent.
After a few hours:
After four days:
As more liquid dropped, the colors began to separate in unexpected ways. The result was a beautiful illustration of time passage.
Time. Throwing Up Theory. Oooof!
So, it has so been assigned that I somewhat loosely expound on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and how it relates to time. Trying to boil this material down to a simplified essence a five year old would be able to understand proved to be most difficult. For one, my knowledge of the subject, even after rereading various entries (and other simplified abstracts deemed more “accessible”) is still shaky, but that which i can glean form the text is utterly fascinating.
The generic definition and entry for general relativity includes this statement in some manifestation: the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses.
Basically, matter causes space and time to curve and that a uniform gravity feels much the same as a uniform acceleration. For the sake of this class, Time, let’s focus on the time aspect of general relativity called gravitational time dilation.
Gravitational time dilation is a product of this curvature of space and time and, in essence, appears to slow down or “dilate” it. In the presence of massive gravity associated with a massive object, like a black hole, time dilation becomes more apparent than with traditional bodies experienced throughout the universe. I found a decent hypothetical example of this in action, though, I am not sure how anyone would ever be able to observe such a thing beyond computer generation: an observer far from a black hole would observe time passing extremely slowly for an astronaut falling through the hole’s boundary and would actually never quite see the astronaut fall in. As far as what the astronaut would be feeling, well, I guess we can’t ask him now can we.
But actually, the astronaut would probably think that time was passing normally. But to him, if he could see his observer, it might seem as if he/she were moving pretty darn fast or time was passing much more quickly.
However, within each persons frame of reference, they are in perfect agreement with the clock. If thirty minutes has passed on the clock, each person has aged thirty minutes.
The difference is exposed when the clocks are compared by separate observers. And that is THE FINAL WORD on general relativity and time.
