I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of reality and have deleved into various spheres of knowledge to try and understand the nature of reality. The inquisitive spark was re-ignited recently at a gathering of media folks in London. Mitch Stratten, was talking about how he created the pioneering Toshiba timesculpture advertisement. The inspiration for this ad was the concept of Space-Time, in which along with spatial dimensions of length, width and height, time serves as the fourth dimension.
Now, the passage of time is itself not absolute – there is no universal clock ticking away anywhere. Rather, time is an illusion – it differs from one frame of reference to the next. This is what Mitt used in his creation: organic movements captured by 200 different cameras in a circular rig, to create motion through repetition. When I saw the ad for the first time, I thought all the effects were a fairly simple thing to do, so no great shakes. But then I realised that there were all raw frames – no morphing, no computer generated imagery – and it was a really complex process (the 200-camera rig, the action sequences, the 2.5 million individual frames, the 20 TB of data…). That’s what makes the ad unique.
Check out the ad and its ‘making of’ video:
The Vedas have always maintained that there is no absolute time, experienced in one uniform manner in all the stages of existence. Sometimes we take a nap for five minutes and venture into our dreamworld, but when we wake up, we think we’ve been asleep for hours altogether. In the waking state, yes only five minutes have passed and we haven’t moved an inch. But in our dream state, we’ve traversed places, spaces and hours or even years of time. Both represent us and our experience. Both are just different frames of Space-Time, fully valid within their own respective reference planes. Even scientists (Einstein included) point to the view that time is an illusion. The world is just a vast collection of moments represented by the wave function of the universe. Time is not real – it is just an emergent quality that is only helpful in organising our observations of the universe when it is big and complex.
Time is all a matter of perspective. The moment is all we have, whatever plane we may be in.
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