Albert Einstein shattered previous ideas about time, but left many pivotal questions unanswered: Does time have a beginning? An end? Why does it move in only one direction? Is it real, or something our minds impose on reality?

As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer?

The nature of time is an age-old conundrum for physicists, philosophers, biologists and theologians. The Newtonian picture of time—a kind of cosmic clock that ticks off time in a manner that applies identically to everyone and everything—tightly aligns with our experience. But with special and general relativity, Einstein showed the fallacy inherent in experience.

While humanity’s past is firmly grounded on our home planet, the humans of the future may live on the moon, Mars, or interstellar ships bound for distant worlds. To prepare …

Our age is marked by the proliferation of information, and yet we can’t agree. Science is supposed to be neutral, and yet it has generated some of the deepest societal …

Your eyes and ears don’t tell you the truth. That’s not what they’re for. The senses evolved to enable us to survive and succeed in the world, not to represent …