IT’S ABOUT TIME

But for those who love, Time is not. ~ Henry Van Dyke 

I’ve been interested in time for a long time. I’ve enjoyed books about time, such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (published in 1895, perhaps the first popular time-travel story); A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking; and The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. I’ve delighted in reading poems about time like “Time Is” by Henry Van Dyke, “On Time” by John Milton and “To Think of Time” by Walt Whitman. Movies like “The Time-Travelers’ Wife,” “Interstellar” and “About Time” have enchanted me.

The nature of time has been considered by eastern and western philosophers and scientists for ages. One interesting hypothetical concept is Time’s Arrow, the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time. Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer, developed time’s arrow 91 years ago and it remains an unsolved question. He argued that time’s arrow, or direction, can be determined by studying the organization of atoms and molecules. Physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time-symmetric. If the direction of time were to reverse, the theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. But assessing time’s arrow at macroscopic levels it often appears that this isn’t always the case: there is an obvious direction of time.

One of the arrows in the quiver of time that’s most interesting to me is the casual arrow of time. A cause always precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it affects. For example, even though birth and death are both passengers on time, birth always follows a successful conception and not vice versa. Thus causality is intimately connected with time's arrow. Not everyone always follows the causal arrow of time; witness analyses that have succumbed to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Economists and time get along uncomfortably. We fastidiously never state a specific number of years that distinguishes short run versus long run trends. Other than to assert as John Maynard Keynes did: in the long run we are all dead. Instead, when pressed by a student, client or Congress-person to differentiate between the short-run versus the long-run effects of economic policies (e.g., price controls, fiscal and/or monetary procedures) economists say that in the long run, all factors of production (land, labor, capital) are variable. The short run is different because at least one factor is fixed in quantity or price. Such an answer is seldom satisfying for the questioner. So it goes…

In the early to mid-20th century one of the hot topics of macroeconomics was business cycles. A nation’s business cycle is the upward (expansion or growth) and downward (contraction or recession) movement of real gross domestic product (GDP) over time, around its long-term growth trend. During this period many economists hypothesized about how long a macroeconomic business cycle actually was, and what factors most influenced it. Arthur Burns and Wesley Mitchell took an encompassing view in their 1946 book Measuring Business Cycles saying the business cycle’s duration can vary from more than one year to ten or 12 years. The Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff posited in 1925 that the period of a cycle ranged from 40 to 60 years. Agreement among economists about the correct duration of the business cycle has yet to ensue; we’ve moved into other fields of debate. The current business cycle’s period of sustained economic growth is over nine-years long. When will it end? No economist knows.

In recent times, some people have said that time’s been speeding up due to improvements in technology that increase how much we can accomplish or produce in a specific period of time. Economists have a concept describing this occurrence – higher productivity. In 2Q2018, annual labor productivity increased a haggardly 1.3%.

Beyond labor productivity, it seems that digital technologies have speeded up not just work-related activities but social ones as well. Exhibit L for this improved social “productivity” is a cover story in The Economist, “Modern Love. Dating in the digital age.” Around the world, about 200 million people now use dating apps and rely far less on friends and family.

Unlike digital dating, physicists note that the Earth's rotation has been slowing slightly over time. Hence, a day now is longer than in the past. This is due to the tidal effects the Moon has on Earth's rotation. Atomic clocks show that a modern day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than a century ago. Do you thus feel any older now? I didn’t think so.

Financial analysts tend to pay far more attention to three-month intervals of time called “quarters” than almost any other time period. The financial world is filled with a plethora of time-dependent factors like price-earnings ratios, debt-to-equity ratios, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) and working capital ratios (current assets/current liabilities). These and other statistics are dutifully reported quarterly and in annual 10-K reports.

At the opposite end of economists’ and financial analysts’ time spectrum is that of geologists. Geologists’ views of time aren’t bound by minor temporal concepts like quarters, business cycles or unspecified short- and long-runs. Nope, their time periods consist of millions of earth-years covering all of this planet’s 4.54 billion year history (rounded to the nearest 10 million years, which is a great many quarters).

Let’s take a geologic look at the history of California; way before the Gold Rush. Like all other land on Earth California has moved quite a bit during the various paleo-geologic ages. Look here to see how it and its neighbors, once a very long time ago part of Pangea, have traversed the globe, and continue to.

For most of its 500+MYA (million years ago) history what’s now California was covered by deep ocean waters. To set the stage for California’s recent (geologically-speaking) rise above water, the Mesozoic Era (250 – 65 MYA) saw the merging of the ancient Sonoma “island arc” of land with the North American Plate to its immediate east. This merger did not require FTC approval and extended the western edge of the North American Plate into what’s now central Nevada.

The creation of dry-land California happened in the Late Cenozoic Era that began 20 MYA. The North American Plate was overriding the spreading center between the Pacific Plate and the Farallon Plate. This spreading center migrated eastward causing massive crustal extension and lifting beneath what is now the Great Basin Region (which spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Oregon and Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, and Wyoming).

The western edge of the North American Plate then overrode hotspots in the Earth’s upper mantle that resulted in extensive volcanism in the Yellowstone, Columbia River and New Mexico regions. It also created the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains that powder-skiers now enjoy. Remnants of this volcanism include Mt. Lassen, Mt. Shasta, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams and Mt. Rainer. By the way, changes in plates’ boundary configurations created the San Andreas and other regional fault systems about 30 MYA.

The San Andreas Fault is about 800 miles long, stretching from the Mendocino coast south to the San Bernardino Mountains and the Salton Sea. Researchers have measured identical rocks offset by 150 miles across either side of the fault. For example, the volcanic rocks in Pinnacles National Park south of Monterey match volcanic rocks in Los Angeles County. Geologists think the total amount of displacement along the fault since it formed is at least 350 miles.

On the west side of the San Andreas Fault sits most of California's population, riding the Pacific Plate northwest while on the east side the rest of North America creeps south. The Pacific Plate is moving northwest at about 3 inches each year, and the North American Plate is heading south at about 1 inch per year. Those inches add up in geologic time. Assuming (heroically) this rate of movement continues unabated, scientists project that Los Angeles and San Francisco will be adjacent to one another in approximately 15 million years, thus making the commute between Santa Monica and Berkeley a breeze.

The San Andreas Fault system moved a maximum surface displacement of about 20 feet in 1906, causing the great 7.9 earthquake, and resulting fires, that destroyed more than 80% of San Francisco. More recently the San Andreas Fault caused the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake that played a small part in the 1989 A’s-Giants World Series. This picture I took shows a fence over 40 miles south of San Francisco straddling the San Andreas Fault in Los Trancos Open Space Reserve that was displaced by the 1906 earthquake.

Geologists estimate that over 10,000 earthquakes occur each year along the San Andreas Fault, but just several hundred are greater than magnitude 3.0, and only about 15-20 are greater than magnitude 4.0. Is this supposed to be reassuring for those of us who live along this long, sinuous, moving neighborhood? Are you ready for the next “big one”? It’s only a matter of time.