It is occasionally the case

[kaberett]

that I will be reading a paper about, say, the discovery of an element, or the physics governing which elements end up in which minerals - the sort of stuff that forms the basis of a literature, that informs all that comes after - and then I will remember it was written in 1860 or in 1937 and I will remember the context, will know what is about to happen, and all of a sudden I find I am dizzied and off-balance.

I think the historical vertigo gets me worst in this general setting precisely because I'm used to measuring time in millions or billions of years. Being abruptly reminded to take a timescale of decades seriously is... something of a perspective shift.

Comments

[quirkytizzy]

Kind of a tangent, but I was thinking yesterday how the human mind just shies away from the idea of immortality, even as we are obsessed with the idea of never dying. I just can't make my brain hold onto the idea of time passing in thousands of years. A hundred, maybe two, sure, but anymore than that and my brain just sort of breaks.

So reading this is neat, because that means there is at least one person out there who CAN wrap their brain around chunks of time that long.

Are you a rock or earth scientist? (I don't know what those words for those things are.)

[kaberett]

Okay so I mostly describe myself as a "geologist", but increasingly (like, both of the departments I've studied at in seriousness) places are calling themselves "Earth Science", to acknowledge things like -- the chemical composition of seawater is what it is in part because of erosion inland, and the chemical composition of seawater in turn affects the composition of oceanic crust, which affects what gets erupted by volcanoes above subduction zones (like Japan and the West Coast of the US)... and stuff about the atmosphere has also traditionally been A Bit Outside The Realms Of Geology but is increasingly recognised as important and part of the same set of cycles. SO. "Earth sciences" is correct and "geologist" is correct in the broadest sense, but I could also be usefully described as a "geochemist" or a "hard rock geologist" or... :-) Basically, no wonder you're uncertain, terminology proliferates.

It was kind of weird the first time I realised I'd just let it go by without blinking when a lecturer said "recently -- so, the last five million years or so..."; it's still really weird, when I remember, to realise I've got a lump of rock on my desk at work that's four and a half billion years old. Because... those numbers don't make sense on human time scales, is the thing - it's completely okay if I'm thinking about planets and planetary processes, but trying to match it up with people is just... no. I rather suspect the key is having something to peg it on: like, "two hundred and fifty million years" is just inconceivably vast compared not only to human lifespan but to the amount of time humans have existed full stop; but it's a much more comfortable number in the context of "it's the oldest oceanic crust still existing, here's the processes that create and destroy it and the speeds they operate at".

[quirkytizzy]

Exactly! It's so hard for a person to stretch the concept of time back before humans even existed in any form at all. So I think it's especially magical and kind of...brave? somehow?....that some people CAN.

And geologist or Earth Scientist works very well from your description. I know some assholes who don't think our planet needs to be studied and it's upsetting. That sea water that you said affects the earth's crust composition - that's US (in a round about sort of way, but still.) We are the stuff of stars....and the sea.

Lord knows my brain can't do all the science stuff that goes with that. Thank god there are people who CAN, because how would we know the answers without you guys?

[sorrillia]

I am mostly just really confused that papers that old are ever relevant to you...I think I've read one chemistry paper from the 1930's ever that I cared about. Well, I didn't read it, I got a German visiting student to tell me the numbers I needed, because it was in German, but the idea of a physical chemistry paper from 1937 I care about is very weird, and one from 1860 is incomprehensible.

[silveradept]

That process usually works in reverse, as people are used to their timelines existing in decades and then have to confront the reality of billions of years of existence without humanity, our even themselves. Either way, it causes disruption.

[vass]

I get that feeling too, even though I don't usually measure time in millions or billions of years. I think in my case it's because my time sense is gluey and confusing anyway.

[swaldman]

Heh. My field is... younger. There's some fluids and hydraulics stuff from the 1920s, but computational numerical modelling requires computers, and only really started in the mid-70s.

(there was at least one attempt at weather modelling before electronic computers - it involved a lecture theatre full of mathematicians, where each person in their seat was one cell in the model grid. They did their calculations and passed them to the people to the sides of them, etc... it worked, but it was entirely useless, because it took more than 24 hours to predict the weather 24 hour ahead ;-))