cover:
The puzzles and paradoxes of time have dazzled the world's finest thinkers throughout the ages, and helped shape religion, art and literature as well as science. For millennia, philosophers have wrestled with the tensions between time and eternity, linear time and cyclicity, being and becoming.

When Einstein formulated his theory of relativity early this century, it triggered a revolution in our knowledge of time, but it also brought its own set of mysteries. Einstein's time can be warped, leading to bizarre possibilities such as black holes and time travel, but making nonsense of our perception of a 'now' and a division of time into past, present and future. The theory of relativity predicts that time had a beginning in the 'big bang' and yet, absurdly, the age of the universe seems to be less than the ages of some stars. And when it comes to quantum physics, time takes on weirder features still.

Clearly, a full understanding of time remains elusive. What makes time flow? Why is there a directionality, or 'arrow', of time? Can time ever run backwards? Is the universe much older than we think?

In this, his latest book, acclaimed physicist and writer Paul Davies confronts the tough questions about time, including the mysterious relationship between physical time and our psychological perception of it. He gives simple descriptions of topics like the theory of relativity, time dilation and Hawking's 'imaginary time'. Davies concludes that in spite of decades of progress in unravelling the mysteries of time, the revolution begun by Einstein remains tantalizingly incomplete.

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