I have much love for the timelines. They're concrete, something which can be implemented _right now_, and I'm 100% convinced that they effectively convey valuable information to the audience.
Which got me asking myself "Why do I like the timelines so much? What is it about them that hits the sweet spot?". "Context at a glance" says me in response.
I'll assert that
1) Part of the problem with the "firehose of facts" approach to education is that it's hard to retain information absent some kind of a mental framework into which it can be slotted.
2) Understanding "the big picture" is an essential element in building the necessary context/framework.
Which leads me to the further question: Is there a context-at-a-glance equivalent of timelines for other subjects? A visual diagram of "this is how all this hangs together" for any particular subject could help immensely in making that subject digestible. Especially if you hang it in the classroom where people can see it every day?
History has the advantage of being linear; it's just one damn thing after another. (it's actually a cube, because it happens in place and time, but let's skip that for now). It's harder seeing how you can get the big picture for something like math, but maybe that's just my lack of familiarity with the subject. Something to ponder.
First, I really like the attention you’re calling to “put up things that show the context”. This was actually an obsession of mine in graduate school — I thought that every history class should put up (1) timelines, (2) maps, and (3) these complicated concept-map-thingies on the walls.
I had sort of moved away from the third of those — they’re complicated. But your cheering of this idea makes me want to revisit them for high school humanities. Thanks!
For science, there are our “size lines”, which are a way of externalizing the stuff we see when we use the SHRINK RAY° (losttools.substack.com/p/the-shrink-ray). Also, organizing the science curriculum around actual ordinary topics that people think about (like 💡 and 🔥 and 👁️s and 🌋s and 🍏s and 🐈s, to pick this year’s Science is WEIRD line up) lets each topic itself be a sort of context.
So I had a further thought on this, because what else am I going to do while I'm trying to fall asleep?
It started with an observation on the physical sciences, which are frequently (in high school) treated as the triumvirate of physics, chemistry, and biology. "This is an artificial division", says I, "and it would benefit if we could tear down these walls (just a little)". Though the chemists and biologists will scream bloody murder at me, chemistry is physics at a larger scale, and biology is chemistry at a larger scale. This is non-trivially true, I think. The reason why we put them into those three buckets is not because they're a different set of rules, but because they work at different scales and the common topics that they deal with are different.
So I could imagine a diagram which unifies them via a "size line", maybe with some branching. And then there's the question of what comes "above" biology (Hari Seldon to the courtesy phone please) and what comes below physics. Quantum physics, and then math (maybe? is that a category error?) and then...
How do we know about math? Epistemology! And how do we know about epistemology? Observation! And prediction!
There's a set of contingent truths about the properties that the world must have in order for it to be legible to humans. Things like the principle of non-contradiction, object permanence... everything that must be true so that you, as an embodied, thinking being, can get up in the morning, find your glasses, and pour yourself a cup of coffee. From this legible, mostly-consistent world we observe, and build predictions. Some of these predictions are so consistent that we call them "true", and it's from these hard-won pavers that we build the basement of the house of knowledge.
Whew... I'm not usually that poetic.
But anyway, you can see how "All the things we know" could be put on a chart that starts, at the bottom, with the N senses and builds from there.
This is a fantastic idea! For my target age range I would stick mostly to sciences, but it's SO useful to know how different areas are unified. Plus, it's great to let the students themselves discuss what could go above or below the various sciences on the chart.
1. Imagine compressing Sun's lifetime to a human scale. Let's say, 4.5 billion years is turned into 45 years, or 100 million years of real time converted to 1 "comressed" year. To what time the real human life will be compressed? Approximately to the time you'll need to read this statement.
2. Relabeling years works really well, especially around 0th AD. Say, it's year 2024; Jesus was born in 1995 and is now 29 years old. Rome is now ruled by Tiberius after Augustus' death in 2014. Augustus became a ruler in 1973, and Julius Caesar was assassinated in 1956. In 1920 Sulla was a dictator; in 1782-96 the second Punic War was fought; in 1643 Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great; Rome was founded in 1247; and Nefertiti was queen of Egypt at year 670.
That second exercise took me a while to grok, but now that I do — I really like it! The first one I actually have... well, a "qualm" would be overstating it like ten times, but there's something off about it (and the similar deep-time metaphors that folks have come up with). It succeeds at showing THAT the Earth is old, but I feel it doesn't succeed at helping us really UNDERSTAND how old it is — because it still uses numbers (4.5 billion, 100 million) that are too big to easily comprehend.
And that, I think, is where turning this into a physical line (or series of nested physical lines) is helpful — it de-numbers them.
The nice thing about 1:1e8 time scale is that it projects human lifespan into a time period of ~20-30 seconds which is big enough to contain a self-referential thought. 20 seconds is kind long time: it's enough to think about something, and then to think about thinking about it in 20 seconds, and then even a bit more. If it were a second, or an hour, it would be just like a number, but 20-30 seconds is about the scale where we actually can "feel" the passing of time and not be too bored about it.
Another nice thing about this timescale is that it you can mentally flip it, and instead of measuring the deep time in human lifespans, you can measure your own life in these intervals of coherent thinking. When I was a kid, and learned about deep time, I was puzzled on what did dinosaurs do all those hundreds of millions years, and why it took them so long to evolve. Now I can partially grasp the answer by thinking about what I am personally doing with all those 20-second intervals of my life.
You can also relabel the dates using 1e8 timescale, although it takes some adjusting as interesting facts are on the timescale of months & weeks, not years: e.g. Cambrian explosion happened in May 2019; most dinosaurs went extinct on December 27, 2023; humans & apes split about 3 weeks ago, and modern humans appeared yesterday (note that despite how relatively small this time is, it's still huge if you measure it by 20-second intervals that represent human life). Then we have agriculture (52 minutes ago), Roman Empire (existed for ~4 minutes, about 10 minutes ago); and industrial revolution (~a minute or so).
Putting things on a physical line also helps with comparing different timelines. For example, one underappreciated thing about Big Bang is how really long the first second of the Universe was. You can take the neutrino decoupling (which happened at ~1 second). Everything after that is more or less known physics, everything before is weird and less well known (we don't even know how the mass of neutrinos, and can't simulate quark-gluon plasma). So you can put side by side two timelines series: say, on the right - one covering time intervals, from top to bottom, of first few minutes, first few hundred thousand years and so on until reasonable time in the future, and another series (on the left) covering time from some 1e-34 seconds (where inflation started) to 1 second. And then put pretty physics pictures on both of these scales. The scale on the left will be much taller than one on the right, and with a lot of unknowns - exciting!
I've begun making a set of 4 printable nested timelines, each 12 pages long with appropriately-scaled divisions that can either be printed single-sided on card-stock and folded into an accordion book or printed double sided on regular paper and punched or bound. I'm designing it edge-to-edge, so there will be a small bit that won't be printed on any printer. It's my "Big History for Small Spaces" timeline. I am making sure that none of the major date demarcations fall on the folds or in the unprintable area. Because printers around here generally use letter paper, the scale of divisions is based on the imperial measurement system with a light grey ¼" grid in the background. For people who choose not to adhere them together, the pages are numbered. I'm nearly done with Universe Timeline right now; I just want to put marks on it where the other timelines begin. Instead of being labeled from time zero through now, however, I've labeled the Universe Timeline 14 mya - today. I'm first & foremost doing this for me, because I've been looking everywhere for the perfect timeline book & I can't find it— which is how I ended up on this substack a few months ago. Is there any design aspect that you can think of that I ought to add?
I love this! It instantly contextualizes Big Spiral History and provides a physical task to provide kids with a sense of agency about the project of learning everything that has ever occurred.
I have much love for the timelines. They're concrete, something which can be implemented _right now_, and I'm 100% convinced that they effectively convey valuable information to the audience.
Which got me asking myself "Why do I like the timelines so much? What is it about them that hits the sweet spot?". "Context at a glance" says me in response.
I'll assert that
1) Part of the problem with the "firehose of facts" approach to education is that it's hard to retain information absent some kind of a mental framework into which it can be slotted.
2) Understanding "the big picture" is an essential element in building the necessary context/framework.
Which leads me to the further question: Is there a context-at-a-glance equivalent of timelines for other subjects? A visual diagram of "this is how all this hangs together" for any particular subject could help immensely in making that subject digestible. Especially if you hang it in the classroom where people can see it every day?
History has the advantage of being linear; it's just one damn thing after another. (it's actually a cube, because it happens in place and time, but let's skip that for now). It's harder seeing how you can get the big picture for something like math, but maybe that's just my lack of familiarity with the subject. Something to ponder.
Yes!
First, I really like the attention you’re calling to “put up things that show the context”. This was actually an obsession of mine in graduate school — I thought that every history class should put up (1) timelines, (2) maps, and (3) these complicated concept-map-thingies on the walls.
I had sort of moved away from the third of those — they’re complicated. But your cheering of this idea makes me want to revisit them for high school humanities. Thanks!
For science, there are our “size lines”, which are a way of externalizing the stuff we see when we use the SHRINK RAY° (losttools.substack.com/p/the-shrink-ray). Also, organizing the science curriculum around actual ordinary topics that people think about (like 💡 and 🔥 and 👁️s and 🌋s and 🍏s and 🐈s, to pick this year’s Science is WEIRD line up) lets each topic itself be a sort of context.
For math, I think BOSS PROBLEMS° (losttools.substack.com/p/boss-questions-in-math) serve as a sort of natural organizer. (“Oh, I remember that move — it’s was the secret to solving that problem about kangaroos…”) Though also ORIGIN STORIES° (losttools.substack.com/p/origin-stories-in-science-and-math) serve that purpose, too.
This was a very helpful question — thanks again for it!
So I had a further thought on this, because what else am I going to do while I'm trying to fall asleep?
It started with an observation on the physical sciences, which are frequently (in high school) treated as the triumvirate of physics, chemistry, and biology. "This is an artificial division", says I, "and it would benefit if we could tear down these walls (just a little)". Though the chemists and biologists will scream bloody murder at me, chemistry is physics at a larger scale, and biology is chemistry at a larger scale. This is non-trivially true, I think. The reason why we put them into those three buckets is not because they're a different set of rules, but because they work at different scales and the common topics that they deal with are different.
So I could imagine a diagram which unifies them via a "size line", maybe with some branching. And then there's the question of what comes "above" biology (Hari Seldon to the courtesy phone please) and what comes below physics. Quantum physics, and then math (maybe? is that a category error?) and then...
How do we know about math? Epistemology! And how do we know about epistemology? Observation! And prediction!
There's a set of contingent truths about the properties that the world must have in order for it to be legible to humans. Things like the principle of non-contradiction, object permanence... everything that must be true so that you, as an embodied, thinking being, can get up in the morning, find your glasses, and pour yourself a cup of coffee. From this legible, mostly-consistent world we observe, and build predictions. Some of these predictions are so consistent that we call them "true", and it's from these hard-won pavers that we build the basement of the house of knowledge.
Whew... I'm not usually that poetic.
But anyway, you can see how "All the things we know" could be put on a chart that starts, at the bottom, with the N senses and builds from there.
This is a fantastic idea! For my target age range I would stick mostly to sciences, but it's SO useful to know how different areas are unified. Plus, it's great to let the students themselves discuss what could go above or below the various sciences on the chart.
I recommend these two exercises:
1. Imagine compressing Sun's lifetime to a human scale. Let's say, 4.5 billion years is turned into 45 years, or 100 million years of real time converted to 1 "comressed" year. To what time the real human life will be compressed? Approximately to the time you'll need to read this statement.
2. Relabeling years works really well, especially around 0th AD. Say, it's year 2024; Jesus was born in 1995 and is now 29 years old. Rome is now ruled by Tiberius after Augustus' death in 2014. Augustus became a ruler in 1973, and Julius Caesar was assassinated in 1956. In 1920 Sulla was a dictator; in 1782-96 the second Punic War was fought; in 1643 Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great; Rome was founded in 1247; and Nefertiti was queen of Egypt at year 670.
That second exercise took me a while to grok, but now that I do — I really like it! The first one I actually have... well, a "qualm" would be overstating it like ten times, but there's something off about it (and the similar deep-time metaphors that folks have come up with). It succeeds at showing THAT the Earth is old, but I feel it doesn't succeed at helping us really UNDERSTAND how old it is — because it still uses numbers (4.5 billion, 100 million) that are too big to easily comprehend.
And that, I think, is where turning this into a physical line (or series of nested physical lines) is helpful — it de-numbers them.
Thoughts?
The nice thing about 1:1e8 time scale is that it projects human lifespan into a time period of ~20-30 seconds which is big enough to contain a self-referential thought. 20 seconds is kind long time: it's enough to think about something, and then to think about thinking about it in 20 seconds, and then even a bit more. If it were a second, or an hour, it would be just like a number, but 20-30 seconds is about the scale where we actually can "feel" the passing of time and not be too bored about it.
Another nice thing about this timescale is that it you can mentally flip it, and instead of measuring the deep time in human lifespans, you can measure your own life in these intervals of coherent thinking. When I was a kid, and learned about deep time, I was puzzled on what did dinosaurs do all those hundreds of millions years, and why it took them so long to evolve. Now I can partially grasp the answer by thinking about what I am personally doing with all those 20-second intervals of my life.
You can also relabel the dates using 1e8 timescale, although it takes some adjusting as interesting facts are on the timescale of months & weeks, not years: e.g. Cambrian explosion happened in May 2019; most dinosaurs went extinct on December 27, 2023; humans & apes split about 3 weeks ago, and modern humans appeared yesterday (note that despite how relatively small this time is, it's still huge if you measure it by 20-second intervals that represent human life). Then we have agriculture (52 minutes ago), Roman Empire (existed for ~4 minutes, about 10 minutes ago); and industrial revolution (~a minute or so).
Putting things on a physical line also helps with comparing different timelines. For example, one underappreciated thing about Big Bang is how really long the first second of the Universe was. You can take the neutrino decoupling (which happened at ~1 second). Everything after that is more or less known physics, everything before is weird and less well known (we don't even know how the mass of neutrinos, and can't simulate quark-gluon plasma). So you can put side by side two timelines series: say, on the right - one covering time intervals, from top to bottom, of first few minutes, first few hundred thousand years and so on until reasonable time in the future, and another series (on the left) covering time from some 1e-34 seconds (where inflation started) to 1 second. And then put pretty physics pictures on both of these scales. The scale on the left will be much taller than one on the right, and with a lot of unknowns - exciting!
I've begun making a set of 4 printable nested timelines, each 12 pages long with appropriately-scaled divisions that can either be printed single-sided on card-stock and folded into an accordion book or printed double sided on regular paper and punched or bound. I'm designing it edge-to-edge, so there will be a small bit that won't be printed on any printer. It's my "Big History for Small Spaces" timeline. I am making sure that none of the major date demarcations fall on the folds or in the unprintable area. Because printers around here generally use letter paper, the scale of divisions is based on the imperial measurement system with a light grey ¼" grid in the background. For people who choose not to adhere them together, the pages are numbered. I'm nearly done with Universe Timeline right now; I just want to put marks on it where the other timelines begin. Instead of being labeled from time zero through now, however, I've labeled the Universe Timeline 14 mya - today. I'm first & foremost doing this for me, because I've been looking everywhere for the perfect timeline book & I can't find it— which is how I ended up on this substack a few months ago. Is there any design aspect that you can think of that I ought to add?
I love this! It instantly contextualizes Big Spiral History and provides a physical task to provide kids with a sense of agency about the project of learning everything that has ever occurred.
Sonlight homeschooling curriculum has a bunch of image-based timeline stickers: https://www.sonlight.com/homeschool/subjects/history-geography/timeline-figures