From St Augustine’s philosophy to HG Wells’s science fiction, these are some of the best books about a subject that is both very familiar and very strange
Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language, yet we hardly understand what it is. The purer physical and mathematical aspects of time continue to be debated by the great minds of cosmology, and there are excellent books on that subject, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to Richard Muller’s more recent Now: The Physics of Time. But I’ve always been drawn to the more tangible and human questions: how do our cells tell time, and how does that telling seep upward into the neurobiology, psychology, and consciousness of our species? How is it that our smartphones and wristwatches manage to consistently agree on what time it is? And the clocks inside us, how pliable are they? Can they be made to speed up, slow down, go backward? Why does time preoccupy us, and is there anything we can do about it?
The search for answers to these questions consumed me for several years as I wrestled them into my latest book, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation. What began as an intellectual journey morphed into something between a pastime and an obsession, accompanying me through one job and another, the birth of my children, pre-school, grade school, beach vacations, and countless cancelled dinner dates and blown deadlines. It was meant to be a book about time that I finished on time; it became a meditation on living life and not wanting time to end. Along the way, I read a great many books by other authors that dealt with time in one way or another; these are some of my favourites.
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