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WITH a terrified yell, the young man drops away from us, plummeting towards the ground some 12 storeys below. The unflinching slow-motion camera heightens the tension, time appears to stand still ... then the net catches him.
His fall is a controlled experiment. Strapped to the subject's arm is a "perceptual chronometer" with an LED read-out. Beforehand, the volunteer was unable to read the rapidly flashing numbers on the screen, but during his fall, he was able to make them out with a significant degree of accuracy, reading 56 for what was in fact 50, 96 for 98.
So it seems that in these high-adrenalin moments, time, if not quite standing still, does indeed slow down for the endangered individual, and the controlled drop was just one of the many experiments conducted for Time, BBC Four's expansive exploration of just what makes us, er, tick.
"That was the first time that anyone has actually measured as a fact that, in a life-threatening situation, time slows down for us," says Dr Michio Kaku, physicist, pioneer of string theory and our guide throughout the four-part series. "He was able to read these numbers to an extent that could not be random."
As Kaku observes in the first programme, as pedestrians swirl around him in a fast-forward blur: "Time drives every second of our lives in ways we can hardly imagine."
He is talking to me from Manhattan, where he is Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, although his investigations for Time went way beyond the theoretical. The four programmes take us on a mind- boggling journey, from our own relationship with time through the immensities of geological time, to the outer limits of the cosmos itself and the intriguing prospect of time travel.
It kicks off with an investigation of how time functions within and around ourselves - or, more particularly, within Kaku himself as he is brain-scanned, reflex-analysed and generally pinched and poked in tests which reveal just how much our bodily functions are time- sensitive. Even our pain thresholds change during the course of...