The Nature of Time

About the Topic

What is time?

The question has long occupied philosophers, scientists, and poets.

Is it the river that never stops flowing, or the sense that youth cannot return?
Or an illusion we inhabit but cannot step outside?

Physics offers another account of time.

We will return to the early twentieth century and the upheaval in our understanding of the physical world.

When Maxwell’s work showed that the speed of light was determined by natural constants, its constancy began to challenge familiar ideas of space and time. Einstein, working in a Swiss patent office, then developed an argument with remarkable consequences:

The faster the motion, the slower time passes;
in strong gravity, time can appear almost to stop;
near a black hole, time can be distorted.

Beginning with the difficulties of classical physics, this talk will derive key equations of relativity and consider black holes, the objects behind two Nobel Prizes.

How were they predicted with paper and pencil?

Could we travel through one as in Interstellar?

Is time travel possible?

Could we return to the past, or travel into the future?

The talk follows these questions from relativity to the edge of a black hole.