Produced in partnership with Scientific American magazine, Examining the Big Questions of Time explains how philosophers, physicists, cosmologists, and neuroscientists have wrestled with the deeper meanings of time and what their research has contributed to our collective understanding of it. With Laura Helmuth, Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American, as your guide, this course challenges you to leave your assumptions about your personal temporal existence at the door and to allow your mind to be pushed to the farthest frontiers of the past and future, to the edge of the universe.

While we’ve exponentially increased our ability to measure time, how much progress have we made in understanding the nature of time itself? Galileo and Newton both worked with the concept of time, but assumed it was an absolute, the same for everyone, everywhere. Einstein’s theories showed that time is relative, dependent on the motion of its observers. In this course, studies from Scientific American will guide you through many of humanity’s most exciting questions about time, including:

• Is time real, or is it an illusion?
• Could the universe have existed before the Big Bang?
• What can the quantum world teach us about time?
• Must time always move from the past to the present?
• Could wormholes help us travel through time?

With the benefit of thought experiments, mathematics, and our increasingly accurate ability to measure time, some of our biggest current questions about time might be answered one day. But with time being as basic to humanity’s existence as it seems to be, new questions will continue to arise, always pushing our thought processes and imaginations to the limit.