Saint Augustine got it right, confessing in The Confessions, “What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” It might not do us much good to know ...

TIME -- what exactly is it? If you were an early Homo sapiens, time meant little. You grew old; the sun rose and set; the seasons came, went and came again; but all this took place on a stage that had ...

EARTH’S age has been a matter of speculation for at least 3000 years, beginning with the Hebraic creation story, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that geochemist Clair Patterson finally cracked the ...

A Natural History of Time by Pascal Richet, translated by John Venerella (Chicago, £17) What is time? How much of it has there been? This magisterial history begins with ancient myth, passing through ...

The title of “A Natural History of Time” (University of Chicago Press, 353 pages, $29) sounds like a paradox. If history is what is measured by time, how can time itself have a history? As Pascal ...

For millennia humans relied on mythical or biblical accounts to conjure up a birth date for our planet. Astronomer Edmund Halley used the amount of salt in the oceans as his calendar. The great Newton ...

Vous avez entendu parler du «consensus scientifique» sur l'existence, l'importance et les causes humaines du réchauffement climatique? Si ce consensus existe, attribuant la cause principale de la ...