The meaning of ‘now’ might seem rather obvious: it’s the state of awareness you’re experiencing at this very moment, of course. But as the UK science writer Jo Marchant details in this talk at the Royal Institution in London, when you dig into how different disciplines and cultures understand the ‘now’, it gets rather knotty. Borrowing from research for her book In Search of Now (2026), Marchant traverses philosophy, physics, psychology and anthropology, deconstructing the concept to show why the present is so hard to pin down.
She then ends on a practical note, weaving the mystery of ‘now’ into an argument for stepping out of clock time and tuning in to your experience. What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time? BBC producer John Lloyd argues against the cult of knowledge and information Mind-bending new quantum experiments are blurring past, present and future From sky charts to atomic clocks, time is a mysterious story that humans keep inventing Is the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ even worth asking?
How the philosophical paradox of aspiration is resolved by a new theory of self-creation True mastery demands going beyond the rules to learn for yourself Are observers fundamental to physics, or simply byproducts of it? I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being
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