Most of us say we instinctively understand what time is, but struggle to describe it. We clearly live our lives in the flow of time, with the past gone and our perception of the present moving toward an undetermined future. It’s been described as the fire in which we burn.  But what actually is it? This occupies the minds of cosmologists and philosophers, and recent research, far from clarifying the concept, makes it even stranger. Time, it seems, may not be fundamental but a by-product of the base structure of the cosmos.

For Isaac Newton, time was set in motion by God and was the universal backdrop in which all events occur. It was unchanging and ever-present; it regulated and set the pace for the clockwork universe, living out the laws of science.

Albert Einstein changed all that. After Einstein, time was considered to be entwined with space, with its rate of passage altered by speed and gravity. Time slows as you speed up, and when gravity is stronger. The astronauts onboard the International Space Station age more slowly than those of us on Earth. It’s a very tiny effect, but measurable. Navigation satellites have to account for this time dilation. If they didn’t GPS systems would be useless. Einstein showed us that time is relative and that there is no cosmic “now” across the universe.

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