Frank, When we built the Corporate Office Building in Florida designed by Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect, I/we

was/were obsessed with time, time left, time to work, time to play, time generally. So Isozaki designed a fantastic building, and we found about 30 quotes about time to be placed on stones in the center garden on which you have to walk if you want to enjoy the garden. Most people are not aware of the fantastic building or how the whole building is about time. You can find all this on line. Below is a short paragraph from the internet on what we did. Michael

The huge, open drum in the middle of the building turns out to be not just an ornamental tower but a vast sundial -Disney officials claim it is the world's largest -- that functions as both a

meditative central court and a way of observing the passage of time. A huge yellow stylus and ball are cantilevered off the yellow rim at the top of the drum, and their shadows fall upon markings on the side walls that indicate solar time. The floor of the atrium within is of loose-laid rock, with a path of set stones, many of which contain quotations about time from such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Donald Duck. But the real thing is the space itself, which has an astonishing, compressed sense of power. You feel space and light here with tremendous strength -- but like everything about this building, it has a sense of resolve, of release, at the same time. From the open top, light comes in and space flows out, both ever-changing; this building in its very essence expresses

the ebb and flow of all natural things, even within the permanence of structure. Time is an implicit theme of every workplace, of course, and it could be exaggerated to the point of grotesquerie. Huge clocks everywhere would be an offense to workers. But Isozaki's way of making the idea of time an explicit presence in this building is also a way of inquiring into deeper relationships: of time to architecture, of architecture to nature, of time to light and space. And by making the centerpiece of this office building, this court of solar time, also a place of meditation, the architect is saying that time matters in the workplace in all kinds of ways -- that contemplative, reflective time is also a part of work.

From: "Frank A. Weil" <FWeil@abacusny.com> Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 11:49 AM To: Michael Eisner <michael.eisner@tornante.com> Subject: THE MEANING OF TIME

Dear Michael, Time is a funny thing. When we are young we take it for granted, when we are old it moves quickly- but its full of fascination. Best, Frank

THE MEANING OF TIME

We all have some sense of time, whether the agonies of waiting or amazingly fast moments of excitement. But, most of us rarely reflect much on where those senses and sensibilities come from. Humans began measuring time so long ago that there is no clear beginning to when and how the concept emerged. Obviously early humans observed the daily rituals of sun up and sun down and the rise and fall of the moon. Gradually, people began to calculate the intervals and attach what we call numbers to those events. It was not as if anyone ever discovered a universal element of time that dictated those passages. If that had happened some of our concepts of time might well have evolved differently. But, as Einstein proved, time itself is relative.

For example, today we think that the time since Jesus was on earth was a LONG time ago. If you were told that that long period of time (about 2000 years) was only one tiny part in 2,000,000 years (quicker than an eye blink) since the beginnings of planet Earth, you would probably have a hard time grasping the meaning of that metric in human terms. Still, it does seem like a long time. To many humans alive today, JFK's death 50 years ago seems like ancient history. The 150 years since Lincoln's Gettysburg address seems so long ago that few grasp its nearness and timeliness today. People 80 years old today have been alive for more than onethird of the life of the United States. For someone that age, it's hard to believe. (Younger readers will simply have to trust me.) A light year is the distance light travels in a year (at a velocity of 186,282.4 miles per second, or some 461 million miles per hour). One might say, "How on earth are we supposed to think about time and distances like that?" In human terms such scales are unfathomable- and a lot of our potential theoretical destinations are thousands or millions of light years away. So, if we want to begin to think seriously about exoplanet exploration, will we have to go back to square one and rethink our basic concepts of time and distance and perhaps reengineer the human species -at least for some of us--for indefinite life? Some of the fundamental measurements of time, distance and direction, such as 360 degrees in a circle could possibly have been other numbers, such as 3600. But the concepts of those fundamentals are fixed, and universal. (To get around this apparent limitation, some physicists are now positing the existence of maybe billions of additional universes!). And, up to now, these fundamentals, our system of time and distances as we need them here on mother earth, have served us pretty well.

In earlier times, different places and regions kept their own time schedules somewhat the way we have time zones today. Then Greenwich, England became the base marker of global time and chronometers (the forerunners of individual clocks) as recently as a couple of hundred years ago. And, now with the Internet, though it may be darker or lighter in different places every day, we really are in one time zone globally--which is NOW! What all this adds up to is this: since time is basically a human construct to fit the needs of humans as we grow and evolve, it stands to reason that we can and should rethink and try to adapt our ideas and use of time into something that will be more useful in the coming age of the Universe.