As events in our world transpire, humans perceive their occurrence as a linear progression for which we have invented concepts of past, present, and future, which summarizes one of the most mysterious concepts in all of physics: time. We tend to take for granted the idea that time is a common part of our everyday lives. We can tell the time of day, for instance, or we can make time for having a coffee with a friend. Yet, despite our familiarity with it, we still have a hard time explaining what, precisely, time really is. In his landmark book A Brief History of Time, the late physicist Stephen Hawking asked a fundamental question about human perception of what we call time: how come we can remember the past but not the future? In other words, what gives rise to our perception of a linear progression of time that only goes in one direction? (READ MORE)

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