Rob Podolski

Ask many people what time is and they might well point to their wristwatch and say ‘that’. Yet there is so much more to time than ‘that’. For centuries religious figures, philosophers, physicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others have tried to nail down precisely what time is and how it arises. Artists and creators have explored time in books, paintings and music etc. I have always been interested in time.

In writing Time: A Wayfarer’s Guide I wanted to create an accessible and non-academic book to showcase the true wonders of time and to draw together its many threads. Wayfarers travel from one place to another as onlookers, rather than becoming too embroiled in the affairs of each place. This aptly describes the approach I decided to take in navigating time’s formidable depth and breadth.

For us time is mostly a personal experience. Looking back at my earliest years, it feels as if time played a much lesser role for me than it does now. Then as I grew up the march of the arrow of time from the past, through the present and into the future became all too familiar. And so did time’s strange distortions. Hours absorbed in playing the piano can seem to whizz by. Yet a matter of minutes spent listening to a boring speech can feel like an eternity. Then there are those breath-taking moments in which staring at a beautiful natural scene or a work of art can induce pleasant feelings of ‘timelessness’. Books on time rarely explore these personal experiences despite their significance to us. I wanted to change that by enlisting the help of the cognitive sciences.

In the course of my education and career as a computer scientist I learned that philosophy and physics have a great deal to say about time... Thermodynamics captures and codifies our experience of the arrow of time. Sir Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics holds that time ticks in the same way across our entire universe. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity refutes this idea of Newton’s and challenges our most cherished notion of the present. Time forms part of the reality described by quantum mechanics, the supremely accurate theory of the micro-world of tiny particles. To boot, there are some physicists who hold that time doesn’t exist at all. And so on… In writing this book one of my aims was to distil a clear and engaging story about time from this vast body of theory whilst avoiding the technical rabbit holes.

During the course of this journey, I wanted to explore a couple of key motifs. The first of these is a dichotomy that often reverberates around discussions of time. Is time something that exists completely independently of and outside of us or is it produced purely by our brain? My view is that time emerges at a largely uncharted boundary between the mental and physical – a boundary that I wanted to explore. In the second of these I ask how might an understanding of time shape the way that we think about our lives? Traditionally, such questions have been left to the humanities and to religion. Yet I think that science is now in a position to offer its own insights. I wanted to elevate these to near the top of the agenda.