Time is something we all experience daily. We organize our lives by clocks and calendars, and we all understand concepts like the past, present, and future. But over the course of human history, the meaning of time has undergone a series of profound transformations. Through lecture and discussion, this course traces that evolution, from ancient civilizations to modern physics and philosophy. We begin by exploring how ancient cultures understood time through the rising and setting of the sun and the changing seasons. Philosophers pondered the nature of time and whether it exists at all. With the work of Galileo and Isaac Newton, the universe was seen by science as a machine governed by timeless mathematical laws and a universal clock. The twentieth century upended the universal clock concept when Einstein showed that time isn't experienced the same way by everyone. A new concept of "space-time" showed us that time is part of a fabric that bends and stretches. Now in the twenty-first century, we have even more theories and experimental results that suggest time is much stranger than we have ever imagined.

This course will combine lecture with class discussions.