Monday 19 November 2012

Time: facts of physics and fibs of the brain?

Time is not what it seems...
Time is money, time is ticking, time is of the essence, time is many things. But what is time really?

Since Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, physicists understand time very differently from our every-day experience of time. 

I look at time the way physicists understand it with Emmanuel Olaiya, a particle physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford in the UK.

I also speak with Craig Callender, a philosopher of physics at the the University of California in San Diego, about his quest to find why we are so hung up on a past, present and future with neatly flowing time between them.

You can find the feature on the FQXi website here. Just scroll down to the second feature.