The Return of Time. From Ancient Cosmogeny to Modern Cosmology

Most people believe that time is real: the seasons change, the hours go by, one moves from cradle to grave. Most physicists, on the contrary, believe that time is an illusion - and perhaps unnecessarily so, as noted by the famous Canadian physicist Lee Smolin. The author of the books “Life of the Cosmos” (1997) and “Trouble with Physics” (2006) reminds us that all the difficulties faced by physicists and cosmologists (from the Big Bang to the “theory of everything”) stem from the problem of the nature of time, and acknowledging its reality could elevate fundamental science to a new level.