When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit: Getty Images Time may not be a fundamental element of the universe but rather an illusion ...

This puzzle is known as the problem of time, and it remains one of the most persistent obstacles to a unified theory of ...

In Newtonian physics, space and time had their independent identities, and nobody ever got them mixed up. It was with the theory of relativity, put together in the early 20th century, that talking ...

Could the observable universe be exclusively composed of layered, mutually entangled systems? The passage of time puzzles quantum physicists, who seek to fit it into a cohesive model. One wild theory ...

A new theory of the fabric of the universe has proposed that time has three dimensions. Moreover, this model leads to the conclusion that these three time dimensions are the true underlying feature of ...

It was already a mind-bending shift, last century, to go from Isaac Newton’s absolute space and universal time to Albert Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time, which is dynamic, flexible, sensitive ...

“This retroactive idea. It has to be that,” says Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, reflecting on a problem about the building blocks of reality that has dogged physics for ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time ...