A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1635.

A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1635. Wallace Collection, London.

Time

Volume VII, Number 4 | fall 2014

Miscellany

During a total solar eclipse in 1919, astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington observed from Príncipe Island that gravity bent the path of light to the degree predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Eddington went on to help popularize relativity and the idea that the universe was expanding. When asked how many people really understood his theories of universal expansion, he replied, “Perhaps seven.”

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC