Price, Huw - Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time

SAINT AUGUSTINE (354-430) remarks that time is at once familiar and deeply mysterious. “What is time?” he asks. “If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.”¹ Despite some notable advances in science and philosophy since the late fourth century, time has retained this unusual dual character. Many of the questions that contemporary physicists and philosophers ask about time are still couched in such everyday terms as to be readily comprehensible not only to specialists on both sides of the widening gulf between the two subjects—that in itself is remarkable enough—but also to educated people who know almost nothing about either field. Time is something rather special, then. Few deep issues lie so close to the surface, and fewer still are yet to be claimed by a single academic discipline.