Explained, Explained

I received an email from the producer, and it said, “I’m writing to you from the Netflix show, Explained, produced for Vox Media, and I’m wondering if you could have a conversation about an episode we’re trying to think about, about the nature of time.”

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I thought, Netflix? They can’t be serious. So, I went and searched, and what do you know, there was the show. And I watched an episode on cricket, because I used to play cricket when I was a kid in India, and it was great.

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I was one of the speakers at the World Science Festival, on a panel discussion about the nature of time. And then there was another talk I did on emergent time, time dilation, and special relativity. The producer had seen these, so that’s why she contacted me.

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I told her about all the cool things you might say in an episode on time, and what questions people have. And she said, “Well, that sounds great. Do you want to be in it?” I said, “Seriously? Well, sure. Why not?”

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Normally, they shoot these in New York, but this was in the middle of the pandemic. So, they sent a crew of three people to my house and filmed me in my living room. Everybody was masked. The producer Zoomed in.

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There was a conversation that lasted two, three hours. In the episode, there are a number of snippets of me basically saying a sentence. But actually, some of the narration, which is done by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, comes from things I said. I thought it was cool. For example, the little diagram of the grid of time, and the phrase “some when”— those are all from me.

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A lot didn’t make it in. I talked about ancient notions of time and modes of time keeping, and different ideas of time that are used in different parts of the world. For example, in India, the universe is often conceived as cyclic, from creation to destruction, versus linear.

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At the very end of my interview I asked who else was participating. They told me one of the other people was Mark Kelly, the astronaut. I said, “Wow, now that makes me cooler.” Nothing cooler than an astronaut.

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It took me three days to watch it. You just worry, “Oh no, what’s it going to be like?” But it was great. The big reaction is that my daughter and son’s friends think it’s great. “Your dad’s on Netflix!”

"Time" is part of the third season of Explained and is available to stream on Netflix.