A revolution in time

A revolution in time

Once local and irregular, time-keeping became universal and linear in 311 BCE. History would never be the same again. What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be […]

No absolute time

No absolute time

Two centuries before Einstein, Hume recognised that universal time, independent of an observer’s viewpoint, doesn’t exist In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have […]

Time: illusion and/or necessity?

Time: illusion and/or necessity?

For a majority of us, time is but an alternate term for what occurs between two random points on the clock. But, here is the gist: clocks – as claimed by scientists – do not measure time at all, but only our very own limited and conditioned impression of it. Time is a concept that […]