The nature of time has plagued thinkers for as long as we’ve tried to understand the world we live in. Intuitively, we know what time is, but try to explain it, and we end up tying our minds in knots.
St. Augustine of Hippo, a theologian whose writings influenced western philosophy, captured a paradoxical challenge in trying to articulate time more than 1,600 years ago:
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”
Physicists and philosophers have long struggled to understand the nature of time: Here’s why