this man is about to be dropped the height of a 12 story building all to explore our experience of time time drives every second of our lives in ways we can scarcely imagine but what is time this is the quest to understand time and our place within it it's a journey that starts with cutting-edge discoveries into what makes us tick and ends with the mind-boggling implications of cosmological time [Music] it's a journey that reveals something extraordinary the more we understand time the more we find that it is time that makes us uniquely human [Music] [Applause]
[Music] [Music] time is the greatest force in our lives it drives us all we are all obsessed by time we never can seem to get enough of it time is invisible time is untouchable and yet time rules our lives as a physicist I've spent most of my life studying time and I know is one of the greatest mysteries in all of nature we all know that time is out there but we can't see it feel it taste it touch it or smell it so how does it exert such power over our lives in this program
I'm gonna find out this is the story of personal time the everyday time that shapes us as people [Music] [Applause] it's midnight on newport beach just outside Los Angeles I've come here to experience a remarkable feat of timing and sure enough to turn up they're coming right on schedule these fish called grunions are arriving here on this beach on this night with in a precise two-hour window there are masses of them already this is really amazing I've never quite see anything like this in my life before this is remarkable within minutes the hundreds have turned
into thousands all arriving right on cue somehow somehow without a compass without a GPS system without a wristwatch without a calculator they're able to navigate the Pacific Ocean they know to come right here to Newport Beach right on time and it's almost like clockwork and the reason they've come here is to make they have just two hours just two hours to carry on the species this is really an extended sense of timing that they have they get it right every single time time is a force of nature that these creatures have to obey and if
they don't obey then they simply don't reproduce at all so time is more than simply an abstract concept to them time is life and death if they get their timing wrong then they simply vanish as a species the grunions achieved their remarkable timing by following cues from the moon and the tides but it's not something they think about their timing however precise is purely an instinct [Music] but surely we humans are different from the grunions we do what we want when we want we are separate from the animals we think about time we know about
time our timing surely is driven by choice not instinct but is it possible is it possible that we might be hardwired and not even know it [Music] in 1962 one man decided to find out if we were unknowingly controlled by time Michel Seif a French geologist went to live in a cave for two months initially with the aim of studying a glacier and the young geologist I decided to stay two months to study these eyes you know and at the beginning the study was only geology and then I have the idea of my life I
decide not to take a watch in the cave I decided to leave without any time cues the decision to live without a watch completely alone was the beginning of a groundbreaking series of experiments I decided to leave following my feeling of angry my feeling of going to sleep it means a cave it's always dark then your body follow is own sense isolated in his own world of time Michel reported everything he did to a surface team and I decide to call them when I awake when I eat when I might be B and when I
go to sleep - your name menu - someone's it wasn't long before Michelle had completely lost track of time as soon as you pass the first night in the cave you're lost in time you are a lost completely lost and you don't know if you have slept only one or two hours or if you slept 10 hours despite the fact that Michelle had lost track of time in his mind the data on the surface began to reveal a pattern even after months of isolation his body continued to follow a roughly 24-hour cycle of sleeping and
waking astonishingly something was controlling his timing from within the main result of the experiment was than human as a body clock independently completely independent from the Earth's cycle michelle seefs experiment had proven for the first time that it isn't only animals who are slaves to their body clock for us to time is an inbuilt biological mechanism controlling our behavior [Music] it makes sense to me that our sleeping and waking will be controlled by the body clock but since Eve's experiment scientists are discovering that time plays a much bigger part than we'd ever realized [Music]
