Contrary to popular belief, it seems good things come in threes. I recently attended my third event at the World Science Festival titled Time Since Einstein. As the title suggests, this event examined the progression of physical thought in the field of time since Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

The panel consisted of six members. David Albert is a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University where he researches the nature of time. Sean Carroll is a Senior Research Associate at the California Institute of Technology where he researches theoretical physics, focusing on cosmology, field theory, particle physics and gravitation. George Ellis is a cosmologist and professor of mathematics at the University of Capetown. He also co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space Time with Stephen Hawking. Michael Heller is a Philosophy Professor at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland where his research involves the intersection of physics, philosophy and theology in describing the nature of time. Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara is from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics where she works to develop models on the flow of time. The last member of the panel, Roger Penrose, is a distinguished author (The Nature of Space and Time, which he co-authored with Stephen Hawking) and professor at the University of Oxford where he made contributions in studying the arrow of time.

Work in the field of time in the post-Einsteinian era has left many questions unanswered. We are still unsure if time even has a beginning, particularly because we can’t determine what happened in the moments before the big bang (before the existence of time). Additionally, if we can’t determine if time has a beginning, how can we know if it has an end? More importantly, is time symmetric, or is it asymmetric as described by the arrow of time?

In essence, modern physics is still trying to unite Quantum Theory and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Physicists are using quantum mechanics to address post-Einsteinian questions of time. From the panel discussion, it seems that physicists agree that time is a direction in space, but the uncertainties that exist within quantum mechanics still cannot be explained. Many theories have been put forth, the most famous of which was proposed by Stephen Hawking himself.

So it seems that time is still debatable. Luckily we have many bright physicists working very hard to answer these complex questions, and they have all the time in the world. Right?