About Time

A Palaeolithic farmer moved through the sun-fuelled day and star-steered night in a radically different way than the Elizabethan merchants who set their pace to the clocks newly installed in their town squares.

Since then, science has swept time into increasingly minute and standardized units – the industrial efficiency of ironworks’ punch clocks; the space-age precision of atomic fountains and GPS satellites; the fifteen-minute increments of Outlook’s digital revolution. And in the past decade, string-theory branes, multiverses, and “clockless” physics have begun to overturn our ideas about how the universe began – the Big Bang – in ways that will completely rewrite time and our experience of it.