In The Field

World Science Festival: Had we but time enough

Posted on behalf of Richard Van Noorden

What happens when seven people, in 90 minutes of unscripted conversation, try to explore the nature of time?

At Saturday’s World Science Festival ‘Time Since Einstein’ event a confusing but inspirational mess emerged: a verbal Jackson Pollock. Which – when explaining the nature of spacetime, the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, reconciling the two, time’s arrow, entropy, non-locality, the big bang, and our personal conceptions of past, present and future – was probably as much as the organisers could hope for.


The whole smorgasbord was loosely coordinated by journalist John Heckenberry. Dealing with his affable non-sequiturs were philosophers David Albert and Michael Heller; physicists Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose; and cosmologist Sean Carroll. “That is absolute nonsense,” Carroll replied to one of his host’s particularly off-the-wall pieces of pseudo-science.

My neighbour fell asleep, but the panellists got plenty of eager follow-up questions and autograph requests. “Do you want to go for another hour?” asked Hockenberry at the close of conversation. “You crazy World Science Festival audiences,” he said as yes’s buzzed through the room.

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