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.