Talk:Slicing time

Interestingly enough, in Thief of Time, Lu-Tze attributes a lot of research and development into slicing time to a presumed long-gone History Monk with the interestingly Hublandish name of "Zimmerman".

"Zimmerman" is also, on Roundworld, the real name of philosophically-inclined poet, singer and songwriter Bob Dylan.

Yet again it feels as if TP is reeling out a snippet of bait to see if anyone bites and can establish the connection - as with "Smith-Rhodes", for another very marginal character in the canon, names like this do not feel as if they were chosen accidentally.

But I'm still stuck for clear references to time manipulation in the songs of Bob Dylan - I'm sure I've missed something that stands so far out in plain view that it's invisible!

Any ideas? --AgProv 18:48, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

How about Dylan's general lyric style of flickering images that almost make sense, but you feel you missed a bit of explanation? It's rather like TP's comment that all the references are jokes but often the reader hasn't been told the middle part. --Old Dickens 19:43, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Times they are a-changin? (unsigned comment by 86.3.134.58, 09:52, 20 December 2009)

Hee hee; you should have signed that one...may be the answer, too. --Old Dickens 14:58, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

(Kicks himself into touch) - how far out in plain view can you get? Thinking back to the precise wording of the text in Thief of Time, Lu-Tze talks about "Zimmerman's Valley" as a deeper and more profound zone in time-slicing, where the blue and the red take on deeper, more blood-like tones, everything is colder, it is not a place for the beginner or the unwary, but greater gains may be made both in terms of ground covered and in comprehension of the meaning of time. Now there are several references to The Valley as a concept in Dylan's writing - it probably has something in common with the "lonely valley" of Brutha, that he can only walk all alone. (See Here:- [[1]])

I quite like the lines

One more cup of coffee before I go/To the valley below.. ("One more cup of coffee") --AgProv 11:39, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Relativity theory or quantum mechanics seems more likely than Bob Dylan, but still no blatant candidate. Does The Science of Discworld have an index? I thought the difference in the way Susan Sto-Helit moved in no-time was interesting (page on Time).

True, there's J E Zimmerman and Neil Zimmerman, but they're not as well known as the bard of Hibbing. --Old Dickens 15:20, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

James Edward Zimmerman's main contribution was in the development of supercooled supercomputing devices, in which things suddenly flow faster and easier as they get very cold. Sounds familiar. --Old Dickens 15:12, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

The delight of Terry again, then: never assume, when the bait is being dangled out, that there's only one hook. Why stop at one Zimmerman? One is a scientist approaching his subject like a poet; another is a poet approaching his lines like a scientist! Terry again - multiple (quantum) levels of meaning in one throwaway line, but we have to work damn hard and think a lot for ourselves to see the beauty of it.--AgProv 15:29, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

On a Dylan album (to me one of his best) the title is Blood on the Tracks - ie, red-shift; but the opening track is called Tangled up in Blue, a chilly realisation of how the passage of time afects relationships and people and ideals and causes them all to decay and atrophy.--AgProv 09:03, 14 June 2010 (UTC)