JW Dunne’s “An Experiment With Time” (1927)

Professor Solomon, author of the indispensable How To Find Lost Objects and a history of Coney Island, now introduces us to JW Dunne, an Irish aeronautical engineer who in 1927 published a curious essay titled "An Experiment With Time." The gist is that the past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously. But the core of the book is Dunne's description of a simple experiment he performed involving his dreams to test his theory. Interestingly, the book seems to have been quite influential, having been referenced by everyone from TS Eliot and Aldous Huxley to William S. Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, and CS Lewis. From Professor Solomon:

Dunne had been bewildered by a series of precognitive dreams. In one of them, he had dreamt of the eruption of a volcano on a French island and the death of 4000 islanders. When the newspaper arrived, it headlined the eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique and a death-toll of 40,000. Seemingly, the horrifying dream had been prompted by his later reading of the newspaper account. Of his predictive dreams, this one was the most dramatic; but all were perplexing. They seemed to violate rules far more fundamental than those of contract bridge.

His experiences led Dunne to make a study of the relationship between time and dreaming. He went to sleep each night with a notebook and pencil under his pillow. And in the morning he quickly recorded his dreams, before they faded from memory. When he compared their images with the occurrences in his daily life, Dunne made a startling discovery. Generally, a dream derived its imagery from vivid or unusual happenings within a space of 24 hours—24 hours in either direction.

"Professor Solomon on An Experiment With Time"

JW Dunne's "An Experiment With Time" (Amazon)

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Neptune Canada is one big undersea experiment

by Mark R - on August 17th, 2011

Studying the sea is very important to more than just biologists, and the Neptune Canada is the “world’s largest cabled undersea observatory”.

It isn’t just called Neptune because it is under the sea, but it is a very clever acronym for North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments. Whoever thought of that acronym is a complete genius. The Neptune has sensors located in Western British Columbia, through the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, and stretches out over 530 miles.

There are six nodes spread out at various locations, and I believe that one of them is seen in the image here. It has 250 instruments in between these nodes, and it has collected 10 terabits of scientific data since December of 2009.

All of this amounts to sensors that measure and record still and video images as well as scientific data such as microbe samples, temperature, pressure, salinity, and current flow. All of this data is available to the public for free a tthe official website.

As you might have guessed, this system costs $106 million to install, and needs $12 million to maintain its services. I wonder if we have discovered any valuable enough data to justify this expense, or else this product will just be abandoned at the bottom of the ocean.

Source

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