Time
19 articles-
Why Your Brain’s Sense of Time Is So Elastic
Our sense of time may be the scaffolding for all of our experience and behavior, but it is an unsteady and subjective one, expanding and contracting like an accordion. Emotions, music, events in our surroundings and shifts in our attention all have the power to speed time up for us or slow it down. When […] -
Forget Everything You Think You Know About Time
Studying time “is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes.” -
Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness—But Time Just Might Do It
A city’s pace of life was indeed “significantly related” to the physical, social, and psychological well-being of its inhabitants.Photograph by Neta Bartal / Flickr While on vacation in distant locales, people often find that time moves quite differently than in the places they’re used to. In the tropics, we settle into the grooves of “island […] -
A New View of Time
Introducing the Nautilus Time Project. -
Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present
Think there’s no time like the present? Modern physics begs to differ.
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The Multiple Multiverses May Be One and the Same
If multiverses seem weird, it’s because we need to revamp our notions of time and space.
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To Understand Your Past, Look to Your Future
An alternative to the Newtonian worldview promises to help explain quantum weirdness.
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Fallingwater: A Building That Bonds With Nature and Dances With Time
A visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous American home.
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The Amazing Sky Calendar That Ancients Used to Track Seasons
The Nebra Sky Disk photographed in Basel, Switzerland, in 2006Dbachmann via Wikipedia Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Henry Westphal is tired. It’s July 4, 1999, a Sunday. He and a friend are climbing the Mittelberg or “Central Hill,” a small mountain near Nebra, in central Germany. Both […]
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The Ends of Time, in Art and Science
In Gallery 919, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a giant breathing machine. Its creator, William Kentridge, calls it “the elephant,” after Charles Dickens’s description of factory machines that move “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” On the walls surrounding the elephant […]
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Here’s Our Cutting-Edge, Crowdsourced Imaginary Time Capsule
Humans have long had a desire to capture the now—to freeze the current moment to look back on after it has left us. We painted, wrote things down, developed photography and storage systems, and built vast libraries of books and images. In 1939, during the New York World’s Fair, Westinghouse introduced the first-ever “time capsule” […]
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Where Did Time Come From, and Why Does It Seem to Flow?
ASU Paul Davies has a lot on his mind—or perhaps more accurate to say in his mind. A physicist at Arizona State University, he does research on a wide range of topics, from the abstract fields of theoretical physics and cosmology to the more concrete realm of astrobiology, the study of life in places beyond […] -
Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, But Time Just Might Do It
While on vacation in distant locales, people often find that time moves quite differently than in the places they’re used to. In the tropics, we settle into the grooves of “island time” and relax thanks to a more leisurely rhythm. A trip to a big city can leave us exhilarated but also drained by the […] -
Imagine a World With One Universal Time Zone…
A warped photo of Big Ben. Alan Cleaver via Flickr Earlier this month, the chief minister of the Indian state of Assam, Tarun Gogoi, started something of a brouhaha with a bold pronouncement on the generally sleepy topic of time zones. “We need a local time for Assam and the other northeastern states which will […] -
What Would You Put in a Science Time Capsule?
It’s 2014: Sixty-one years since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Four hundred seventy one years since Copernicus published the heliocentric model of the universe. And one year since the Higgs Boson was discovered. In 100 years, how will we look back on today’s science?We’re building a scientific time capsule—a collection of objects […] -
Life Is a Braid in Spacetime
How to see yourself in a world where only math is real.
