{"id":9017,"date":"2005-08-10T22:17:28","date_gmt":"2005-08-11T03:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2005\/08\/10\/relative-importance\/"},"modified":"2005-08-10T22:17:28","modified_gmt":"2005-08-11T03:17:28","slug":"relative-importance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/10\/relative-importance\/","title":{"rendered":"Relative importance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want to say more about those rumored forces mentioned in JoAnne’s post<\/a>, but tomorrow (Thurs) I’m giving a presentation on Time’s Arrow<\/a>, and, ironically, I’m running out of time. The event itself should be great fun. It’s sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council, and will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ll talk about time in Einstein’s universe for half an hour, and then we’ll have responses from philosopher David Albert and artist Antonia Contro. Preposterous Universe readers will remember David from my report<\/a> on a meeting last December. Antonia, in addition to being a talented artist, is the executive director of Marwen<\/a>, a non-profit organization devoted to teaching disadvanaged youths about art. The moderator will be former Preposterous guest-blogger (and occasional radio host) Gretchen Helfrich<\/a>, and I’m sure it will be a blast.<\/p>\n

The event is sold out, but at some point it will be televised on the Illinois Channel<\/a> (“like CSPAN for Illinois”). You can also check out two previous events in the Humanities Council’s celebration of the Einstein year: Peter Galison<\/a> on Einstein and Poincare<\/a>, and Janna Levin<\/a> and Rocky Kolb<\/a> on cosmology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here’s a teaser for my talk. How important is the notion of “time,” anyway? I did the obvious thing — I asked Google<\/a>. So here is the number of search results returned when you search Google for various important concepts.<\/p>\n