Time

19 articles

- Neuroscience
Why Your Brain’s Sense of Time Is So Elastic
- By Jordana Cepelewicz
- November 13, 2020
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 […]
- Physics
Forget Everything You Think You Know About Time
- By Brian Gallagher
- August 27, 2018
A theoretical physicist challenges our common notions about the fourth dimension.
- Psychology
Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness—But Time Just Might Do It
- By Jeanette Bicknell
- June 18, 2018
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 Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . While on vacation in distant locales, people often find that time moves quite differently than in the places they’re […]
- Arts
A New View of Time
- By Beth Jacobs & Lee Smolin
- June 4, 2018
Introducing the Nautilus Time Project.
- Physics
Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present
- By Mark Shumelda
- November 27, 2017
Think there’s no time like the present? Modern physics begs to differ.

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.
- By Dan Falk
- January 24, 2017
To Understand Your Past, Look to Your Future

An alternative to the Newtonian worldview promises to help explain quantum weirdness.
- By Ken Wharton & Huw Price
- May 12, 2016
Fallingwater: A Building That Bonds With Nature and Dances With Time

A visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous American home.
- By Shannon Hall
- June 10, 2015
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 […]
- By Claudia Bracholdt
- December 22, 2014
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 […]
- By Rose Eveleth
- February 3, 2014
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” […]
- By Nautilus Commenters
- January 30, 2014

- Physics
Where Did Time Come From, and Why Does It Seem to Flow?
- By John Steele
- January 28, 2014
ASU Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . 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 […]
- Psychology
Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, But Time Just Might Do It
- By Jeanette Bicknell
- January 24, 2014
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 […]
- Astronomy
Imagine a World With One Universal Time Zone…
- By Amos Zeeberg
- January 17, 2014
A warped photo of Big Ben. Alan Cleaver via Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . 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 […]
- History
What Would You Put in a Science Time Capsule?
- By Rose Eveleth
- January 15, 2014
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? Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in […]
- Math
Life Is a Braid in Spacetime
- By Max Tegmark
- January 3, 2014
How to see yourself in a world where only math is real.