The Place Where Time Flows Backwards
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
- People all around the world tend to represent time via space, but there’s no consensus on which way time goes.
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REFERENCES
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Bergen, B. K. & Lau, T. T. C. (2012) Writing direction affects how people map space onto time. Frontiers in Psychology 3:109. www.frontiersi...
Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75(1), 1-28. www.sciencedir...
Casasanto, D. & Boroditsky, L. (2008). Time in the mind: Using space to think about time. Cognition 106 (2):579-593 lera.ucsd.edu/p...
Majid, A., Gaby, A., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). Time in terms of space. Frontiers in Psychology, 4: 554. www.frontiersi...
Núñez, R., Cooperrider, K., Doan, D., & Wassmann, J. (2012). Contours of time: Topographic construals of past, present, and future in the Yupno valley of Papua New Guinea. Cognition, 124(1), 25- 35. www.sciencedir...
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Ok
Helo
To confuse things further: when a meeting gets postponed, we say it's "pushed back", even though it's moved further into the future. If it's "brought forward", it will be earlier. How did that happen?
I can't find any MinuteEarth videos on Nebula, but I find MinuteBody and a couple of MinutePhysics videos. Is the search just absolutely borked, or are they not hosted there?
Laurie Anderson did a song about going "backwards into the future." I always assumed this is what she meant.
"Where is tomorrow?"
Silksong fans: We are 4 parallel universes ahead of you.
Ok yeah,
But where is that?
Vsauce: But how much does "tomorrow" weigh?
@@xicedreams7625 *Vsauce music plays*
But the game is not out yet :(
@@ThorusCZ I believe that's what he meant.
I am a native speaker of mandarin. Although it is traditionally written from up to down, modern standard of writing mandarin is from left to right, which is how most of the texts (including textbooks) are written nowadays. When the poem or articles from the way past are shown in the text book, they are presented from left to right (and transformed into Chinese simplified, with punctuation marks added), instead of their original up to down then right to left form. So when I have to arrange pictures in time sequences, I would probably arrange it from left to right, same as many English-speaking people do
Yes! This effect is likely getting smaller, both in Mandarin but also in other non-left-to-right languages, thanks to globalization.
Just to further clarify - what I said applys to China mainland. I think we "officially" promoted the left-to-right writing order (in textbooks and government documents) since 1950s, so it has been quite some decades.. Siutations may differ in other places like Hong Kong or Taiwan though
@@CM-cr8wq In Hong Kong and Taiwan, when writing horizontally, we have also changed to writing from left to right. Mostly likely to cooperate with western languages like English. I think the changes occured around 1970s to 1980s. We can still find some old signs and old newspapers writing from right to left. Writing vertically is rarely used nowadays, usually only be found in books. Also when writing vertically, we still write from right to left.
I speak mandarin and I don't speak Japanese, but I know japanese is often written from right to left too. I would imagine however, with influence of american culture (well and also mostly cuz of military occupation i guess) nowadays also in japanese "time" flows from left to right
The Taiwanese textbooks I used in the early 2000s were up-to-down. Older signs in Taiwan and overseas Chinatowns are still right-to-left.
A funny anecdote:
In Israel (where Hebrew is the official language) a sign said:
“Paid Parking 07:00-22:00 חניה בתשלום”
A person who received a ticket for parking without paying during the day appealed to court claiming that the sign suggested that parking should be payed between 22:00 to 07:00 because Hebrew is read right to left.
The fine was waived and it is since then the law to write time from right to left on signs written in Hebrew.
That's interesting.
That's funny! Ah, the grand possibilities of multi-lingual loopholes! ;-)
Super clever
an evil genius
The creative loophole genius of lawbreakers.
Been following this channel for years and their animations are consistently so well done
Hello 👋
This guy lives on TH-cam
heh i caught u
commenter
Yes
I am constantly surprised by this channel presenting me with an idea that if you just gave me a quick pitch for, I'd say sound uninteresting at best -- but when I actually watch a video about it, it's actually kinda interesting and makes me think for a little bit.
So, thanks for keeping me curious guys, it's always a joy to watch the videos y'all put out.
Time goes from bottom to top, just look at an hourglass, or the fossil record
uh clearly time goes from top to bottom, look at objects extremely far away in the sky!
You must be from Australia if your hourglass goes from bottom to top.
Edit: That's a joke, by the way. I know you mean the sand that fell first is on the bottom of the pile.
Time in clearly flowing to the west; after all, people east from me celebrate New Year before I do, while those west from me celebrate it after me.
The past is clearly at the bottom of the hourglass.
@@199NickYT Nah, they clearly move from red to blue.
Ohh I remember an old Tom Scott language video that mentioned that Australian tribe that doesn’t speak in relative direction, only absolute. Very cool to see this expanded!
“People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.” - The Doctor
Docter who?
@@firytwig Idk/s
@@firytwig Yes.
@@firytwig who ?
@@JcoleMc The Doctor
One thing that drives me crazy is how some people say "Let's move that meeting FORWARD one hour" and then make the meeting one hour EARILIER. FORWARD in time is LATER!
Even on a clock it's backwards
It because of the phrase, "push that back" which means to delay, so the opposite of pushing back is pulling forward.
But i would always prefer to be specific and say move it earlier/later by X hours so that there can be no ambiguity.
Maybe it's forward in the meeting's perspective, assumi g the meeting is a physical thing that have a direction and it's facing you
It's a question of whether you think time is a static line that you move through (he's nearing 30), or you're standing still and events are approaching you (the holidays are coming). The second option make the moving forward thing make sense
I have the same issue! As a mnemonic device, I just have to remind myself that "pushing the meeting back" means pushing it away in front of me, so there's more "time distance" between me and the meeting, therefore 'forward' is the opposite.
Its amazing how different cultures evolved their own language system regardless of the norms outside :D
well thats because it is the norm.
when i grew up i didnt know english or didnt know about what you call "the norm outside"
my culture is the norm.. its the outsiders that are not the norm.
normal is just as reletive as the direction of time :)
Guys, you absolutely must team up with CGP Grey!
If you want to fall down a rabbit hole, there is no one better to go with.
Just don't talk about Tiffany
True.
They will probably combine to make a video about what order people listed Tiffany's through time
And it will be incredible
YESSS
Henry Reich is friends with Grey, and he had even made a MinutePhysics video in response to Grey’s transporter video.
These animations are absolutely magnificent
Over the last decade in programming (specifically Android), we've dealt with language orientation more and more. "Left" and "Right" orientation have been phased out and replaced with "Start" and "End". If an app supports it, and you switch your language to an RTL language, like Arabic, you'll notice all the text, icons, etc have their orientation flipped. This happens automatically if you're using start/end rather than left/right.
well technically the future is kinda down in a not-quite-3-dimensional way. wherever there is more gravity there is more future
I dunno, I'd say that there is *less* future wherever there is more gravity. Time goes slower in strong gravitational fields, i.e. "fewer" events happen there per external second. Literally there is less time passing there.
As a computer scientist, I can confirm time flows from top to bottom.
OHH THAT'S WHY THAT'S HOW I WAS THINKING ABOUT IT
My training is in Geology. Time goes from bottom to top.
Doesn't that depend on endianness so big time flows one way and small time flows the other?
we use to say that the future is ahead of us, but when we have to order future events we put the past most one "before", and since "before" means "in front of", it means that the future is behind it.
This completely blew my mind when studying Mandarin. Because of how time is viewed from top to bottom, they have the same words for previous (上 / shang) and next (下 / xia) as over and under. This makes them literally say "The week above" and "The year under" for previous week and next year. 🤯
Also very interesting how the words for above and under is literally an arrow up and down respectively!
As a Land Surveyor it amazes me that I still make the "L" with my hand to remember which is the left side.
Ok wth, how did I not figure this out,
@@ekulerudamuru
Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me
I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb
In the shape of an "L" on her forehead
i love the bit about cultures without written languages and how their concept of time is shaped by their culture and surroundings! reminds me of how some cultures don’t have colors for the rainbow, but go by wet and dry colors. people are cool :)
I speak both Hebrew and English, Hebrew is my native language, and yes, I mostly change the flow of time based in what language I use, but numbers are always left to right so graphs in Hebrew still do left to right time axis
Same for my language, Arabic
@@jordycabrera8048 considering both are Semitic language, I ain't surprised.
Not going to lie, when I read the title "The Place Where Time Flows Backwards." I thought they were going to talk about a quirky part of our universe where entropy seemly decreased.
It's always interesting to me to see how many of our cultural assumptions are just our own culture, and that there are different ways of thinking about these things that I had never considered.
More specifically, traditional Chinese flows top to bottom, then right to left. They would sometimes have poems or text on the sides of entryways. Read starting on the right pillar downwards, and then the left. After Americanising things, Chinese is now usually written left to right, top to bottom, but when being traditional, like engraved poems or general text, it is often done the old way(this was because they wrote on bamboo strips, and strung them together to record text. Vertical strips, right to left.)
If you’re on Twitter, time goes from bottom to the top, if you’re in whatsapp, time goes top to bottom, but if you’re on facebook, time goes everywhere.
Don’t forget the ego-moving vs time-moving dimension to this topic. Do you move toward the future or does it move towards you?
My initial answer is that relativity says there's no difference.
I don't think we have a say in whether we move forward in time or not.
There's no time but the present.
@@only20frickinletters it’s an element of language. Some languages talk about the direction of time as if it’s moving towards you vs you moving towards it. It matters when someone says an event was moved back an hour, some people interpret that as moving closer and others as farther.
@@WanderTheNomad ^
Imagine if time travel became possible in our generation
I can time travel forward at a rate of 1 second per second.
@@mr.johnson3844 me too!!!
Time travel to the future is theoretically possible, it's just a shame we will all be dead when it is possible :/
this reminds me of that one paleplay video explaining why silksong will never come out
Anyone else reminded of Terry Pratchett's trolls?
Was going to comment the same thing. It wouldn't surprise me if Sir Terry had heard of the Aymara people.
Culturally influenced synesthesia? Are color/weekday and color/mood associations also culture specific?
It is interesting but everyone is wrong since time is orthogonal to all three spatial dimensions.
That is a brilliant topic idea.
Weekdays have colours? 🤔
@@SaheeliRai in some nations! And not in others. So yes, definitely culturally influenced for that one.
That get me thinking about a fantasy universe (Ascendance of a Bookworm) where the seasons and elements were all color coded according to theirs gods and those colors actually are present in the people's life.
ooh thats an interesting question
i have synesthesia snd while its not really the same question the culture and general vibes of a place may affect my associations
for example, a wednesday in new york might be purple, but a wednesday in hawaii might be green or pink
*This Little Maneuver's Gonna Cost Us 51 Years*
This was something I learned a few years ago but always surprises me cause we never think about it, but Mandarin is also a front = past, back = future culture. As 以前 = "in the past, before" has 前 which means front. And 以后 = "in the future, later" has 后 which means back.
+1 There are a lot of people griping that mandarin does go left to right these days (not top to bottom), but you're the only one I've found who's pointed out the front/back thing.
As a bilingual english and mandarin speaker, I run into front/back confusion a heck of a lot more often than I run into left/right vs top/bottom issues.
Though... one might argue english itself has hints of reversed front/back time flow. The past came beFORE; the future comes AFTer.
I didn't even know the differences exist. Very mind opening
The reason chinese speakers arrange images up to down is most certainly not because of the writing direction. Almost everyone using left to right these days and top down is only used in some traditional newspapers and decorative workds like calligraphy (thanks, colonialism). The reason is because mandarin describes the future and past as up and down (literally). Like "next week" is literally "bottom week". The reason time is described in this up down way is probably because of the traditional writing direction, but the writing direction is the indirect cause.
This video gives me such a dopamine rush and I don't even know why
I absolutely envy this group of Australian aboriginal people that have literal compasses in their heads.
Compass? There's this big yellow ball in the sky...
@@RichWoods23 But certainly they remember directions much better than we do.
This was the best video on this channel for this year at least, great job!
Terry Pratchett made a similar point in one of his books, where nocturnal creatures speak of "Since the dusk of time...", because for them the dawn is in the future.
English also puts the past in front and the future behind! "Before" is a nautical term meaning closer to the fore - the front - of the ship, and "after" means closer to the aft, or rear. So something that happened earlier is before, in front of, something that happened later, which is after, i.e. behind.
Aw man... I was looking forward to learning about where I could go back to being a kid.
In Mandarin words also talk about time in a top to bottom way like 上 and 下 (top and bottom) even though we write Chinese from left to write mostly now. So grammar and words are more important than writing direction because they are more intrinsic and shape our thoughts, in my opinion.
1:10 mandarin speakers also write books from right to left as well as top to bottom, a sentence would go from the very right of a page or scroll and go from top to bottom than go one column to the left.
2:53 as always ending with a pun 😄 i love it
I always get so happy when I hear Kate's voice. Great video as always!
I like the way she always brings her hyena along for the ride.
I’m a mandarin speaker and yes we do write top to bottom but the little ones write left to right. Also we go from top left corner to bottom right.
That's was part of my College Undergraduate Thesis. Though it was more focused on uses of prepositions. We represent events in a spatial metaphor and not only that the metaphor extends to participants of the event and the prepositions we select correspond to those metaphors. It's quite fascinating how our minds organize language meaning. My thesis was based on the work of Emily Bender, Ivan Sag and Tom Wasow. All very fascinating stuff. 😁
Time is standing still and everything that was shall be, everything that shall be was, and everything that is shall always be
Remember the movie Arrival? Their language is circular same as their concept of Time!!!
I totally thought this was going to be about localized entropy reversals.
So short, yet so informatie and easy to understand!
As a bilingual who speaks both English and Cantonese, i confirm that i arrange those pictures diagonally
2:30 English actually also uses two directions.
The people that came before me. = The people that came "in front of" me. (see: kneel before me)
So in this case the past is in front of us and the past behind us, as well.
Minute earth video titles consistently sound like clickbait until you watch the video
I always go there after taking a nap in the dark, nice to learn more about it
I’m convinced time is not like a thing that actually exist and our perception of time is just the psychological effect of memory, like it’s just the cumulative effect of microscopically T-symmetric events and the fact that entropy is a gradient like energy, that we get a perception that time even exists.
OK, my mind is officially blown. Thank-you.
Really cool to see the different directions time is seen as portrayed in among people who think that time is linear. I'd also be interested in different ways of conceptualizing time. I've also heard it variously depicted as a pool of water or a spiderweb, with events radiating their effects in all directions, or even as a spiral looping back on itself.
I read the title and genuinely thought they made a video about my school.
We don't have names yet for the directions of the 4th dimension. We should just make some up like we did for the others! Any ideas?
jibby-jabby jimbo :)
Ana and Kata /j
At first i thought this was about the distortion of space-time, especially near black holes. Then i realized this was Minute Earth.
the past is above us
we are falling through time
gravity is the pull of tomorrow
entities with high energy output slow their fall through time, thus travelling at or near light speed (very high energy output) results in you returning to an Earth of the future as the rest of the Earth kept falling through time at the same rate as before whereas you slowed yours dramatically
The thumbnail's idea was most probably taken from the movie "Benjamin's Button"... Such a master piece.
Like rafting down foggy river you can't see the past or the future only remember what has been as the present passes you by
This brought a new thought to me.
If the fabric of space time is expanding over time then the past is inside/smaller and the future is outside/bigger than me.
Time is an animation of space
Time is an illusion of transformation
Languages can't be left-to-right or right-to-left, it's writing systems that are left-to-right or right-to-left.
This video summarises Lera Boroditsky's speeches on language and thought.
In Madagscar too, I've heard they represent time back to front !
Nice. Didn't expect a linguistic video from MinuteEarth.
Hold up, I've done this research before at work, so I can add something here.
Audio and video player time, play buttons, and other things related to playback *always* go left to right.
The reason is simple: the direction it flows in comes from the direction tape spools, which is conventionally from left to right! Tape players in Arabic and Hebrew writing regions aren't special - they spool from left to right just like the ones in English and Spanish writing regions. So you will find that it's correct to show a video play progress bar from left to right for all regions in the world, even the ones which write in the opposite direction.
This is just another example of how a now mostly dead technology still affects the way we use computers today.
Note that there is still some contention on what should happen for progress bars _in general_. You'd have to ask a native speaker, but when I did my research, people mostly said they expected it left to right. But in some user interfaces, you can see it going from right to left in Arabic and Hebrew. I'm yet to confirm whether these interfaces are just wrong, or whether they have simply done more research / sampled more people to make their conclusion.
This is brilliant.
I would suppose time is incumbent upon us, from all directions. Indeed, every direction. From a core that has experienced less time, to an external that is constantly timeless.. if that makes sense.
Time is change. The less change, the less time.
1:57 - Interestingly, there are many language, especially in Aboriginal Australia, that don't have word for "left" or "right" at all; instead, they just use cardinal directions for everything. You don't have a left and right hand - instead, you have an East and West hand, and if you turn around the names of your hands change.
Interestingly, people that speak a language with this quirk subconsciously develop a sort of internal compass, so they generally know which way North is pointing at any given moment. Actually, I think NativeLang and Tom Scott have both covered this at some point.
Okay video. Thanks for uploading!
It doesn't matter which way it is describe as long as the arrangement are ascribed their timestamp correlation to signify the entropy in action so that anyone looking at it from any direction understand what is being represented.
Like a light source and object and the shadow created. The radiance determines the direction regardless which way it is pointed in space. First there must be light, second an object to block it, thus creating the shadow.
Another example is an equation.
1 + 2 = 3 is the same as 3 = 2 + 1.
that last bit got me good
The narrator sounds constantly surprised. It’s exhausting.
This is was the most random way to tell that people of some languages write in a different direction
American Sign Language places the past behind oneself. I believe Chatino Sign Language and Marduk Sign Language (from Mexico and Turkey, respectively, if memory serves), both put the past in front and the future behind
Oh cool! At the end of the road is a Diglett waiting for me!
Top quality content as always from MinuteEarth and teaching us about things that we would most likely never use!
In film, things moving right to left on screen are often intentionally used to show something is wrong, bad, or unnatural.
In British Sign Language, the timeline is over your dominant hand's shoulder like a plank of wood, future forward, past backward. Tomorrow is ☝️ against the cheek flicked forwards, yesterday backwards. It's a lovely way to do it.
When we say a person is standing before us, they are in front of us. But if an event happened before, it is in the past. Similarly, aft is behind us, but after is toward the future.
It's also a cinematographic convention to represent time going from left to right
Really interesting, thank you!
i was expecting this video to be about someplace weird and quantum-y, like the inside of a black hole or something. but no, this was actually way more interesting.
I remember reading about a culture (I think it was somewhere in northern to central Asia) where they talked about places being "upstream" or "downstream". I wonder if they'd describe the flow of time in the same way.
You can also think of phrases like “what do I see before me” and “the person after me in the queue” as being in complete contradiction to our “past=behind, future=ahead” mentality
You guys should have used Guoyu (國語; Taiwanese Mandarin) instead of Putonghua (普通話; mainland Standard Mandarin). The PRC's official renaming of Guoyu to Putonghua in 1955 coincides with when up-to-down was replaced with left-to-right. Furthermore, the PRC simplified 話 to 话.
Well according to space-time, any place in any direct at any distance from us is some-when and somewhere. If you're seeing it with your eyes, it's a snapshot of somewhere else some-when in the past. So when you asked what direction is the future, I immediately thought 'any direction'. Not left to right. The only important aspect to what is the future or the past is that it is not where you currently are. The direction is largely dictated by the source and if we consider our tool of measurement it to be the future, or its origin to be the past.
The only correct depiction of time progression lies on the third spatial axis - from closest to farthest. This axis is the only one that matches our most common experiences with travel & time: Distant objects will come into our sphere of influence AFTER we've already come into contact with less distant objects, relative to our initial vantage point. Consider it like flipping through a stack of notes... When preparing a speech, you arrange your cards such that the first ones are closest to you, at the 'top' of the stack. When you're looking at the cards head on, flipping through them carries you "forward" in time, to the end of the speech.
It's kind of hard to draw that though, so people were forced to adopt alternate perspectives... 1. Left-to-right, as if our heads were turned to the right and we were walking forward. 2. Right-to-left, as if our heads were turned to the left and we were walking forward. 3. Top-to-bottom, as if we were looking down at the ground and walking forward.
The most sensible presentation of time is thus to equate it with our perspectives during spatial transfer, since that's how we most often encounter time's passing!
Curiosity Stream is pretty underrated, to be honest.
yeah probably is.
Thank you for being honest
Expected physics discussion... Got philosophy discussion... Not disappointed
Your content is so informative and mind shuffling... 🙌🙌🙌...Can please post a video on the content of java man and the eras of human evolution?
Time is directionless is a parameter to measure changes from one event to another.
1:46 well freaking DUH time flows from east to west, the sun goes the same way!
This video breaks my brain
Jeremy Bearimy, for sure
In Chinese the word 前 in terms of space means front or forward, but in terms of time, it means the past.
I was expecting the example of the Tuva people of Mongolia (the same ones who do throatsinging) as the group that puts the future behind them looking toward the past!