The passage of time

In The passage of time, you can see:

• A working paternoster lift in perpetual motion: invented in the 1840s
• Rocks formed a billion years ago
• Perspectives on time from physics and philosophy: from Einstein to Bergson

Every now and then, time stares us in the face and reminds us of the depth of its existence. It might happen when we look at a childhood photo of ourselves, say goodbye to someone who has passed out of time, or discover a rock formed a billion years ago. But what is time, really?

You can ponder this in the company of our remarkable paternoster lift, where the cabins travel both up and down at once in a continuous, endless motion. This type of lift was invented in England in the 1840s and takes its name from the Catholic prayer beads, the paternoster, whose beads are linked together in a ring.

Humanity's relationship with time is inseparably tied to nature, to dawn and dusk and the turning of the seasons. We experienced the days as shorter in winter, because daylight arrived late and faded early. Did time then also pass more slowly?

What does it do to us that we have increasingly replaced nature's time with clock time? Today we speak of living in the geological epoch of humankind, the Anthropocene. We affect nature in ways that are both highly visible and barely possible to grasp. Do we also affect nature's time?

Time belongs both to the realm of tiny units and to the vast, almost eternal processes. The physicist John Wheeler explained time as nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once. His friend Albert Einstein showed that the passage of time varies from object to object, depending on how fast they move.

In a philosophical sense, time is subjective and experienced differently from person to person. The philosopher Henri Bergson distinguished between the time of natural science, divided into mathematical units, and the time we experience directly – an indivisible, flowing process he called 'duration' (durée).