From the starting gun to the final whistle, time is central to our lives and experience. We shape our days with diaries and timetables, even if the trains do not always take note. Yet the nature of time itself is elusive and unknown. A new year begins, we get older, but however closely we look we cannot observe time but only its passing. Time is equally puzzling to science. Central to its laws, from Newton to Einstein, yet as with experience, science is unable to describe time itself. Strangely in the so-called 'block universe' of contemporary physics the direction of time disappears, yet time remains without our being able to say what it is.
Should we account for the mystery of time by seeing it as the structure of the universe and so not itself an object in the universe? Is time, as Kant argued, the way we have to think if we are able to experience anything at all? Or is the mystery of time a glimpse into the essential unknown and unknowable character of the human condition?
Philosopher of science Tim Maudlin, author Emily Herring, and professor of quantum physics Ivette Fuentes debate the nature of time.