The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

It is memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made. In this sense we exist in time. It is for this reason that I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

Aristotle believed that it did. If nothing changes, time does not pass – because time is our way of situating ourselves in relation to the changing of things: the placing of ourselves in relation to the counting of days. Time is the measure of change:8 if nothing changes, there is no time.

might just as well ask what is most real – the value of sterling in dollars or the value of dollars in sterling. There is no ‘truer’ value; they are two currencies which have value relative to each other. There is no truer time. There are two times that change relative to each other. Neither is truer than the other. But there are not just two

Buddha summed this up in a few maxims that millions of human beings have adopted as the foundations of their lives: birth is suffering, decline is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, union with that which we hate is suffering, separation from that which we love is suffering, failure to obtain what we desire is suffering.19 It’s

Aristotle was the first to discuss in depth and with acuity the meaning of ‘space’, or ‘place’, and to arrive at a precise definition: the place of a thing is what surrounds that thing.

But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.

storm is not a thing, it’s a collection of occurrences. A cloud above a mountain is not a thing, it is the condensation of humidity in the air that the wind blows over the mountain. A wave is not a thing, it is a movement of water, and the water that forms it is always different. A family is not a thing, it is a collection of relations,

In 1883 a compromise is reached with the idea of dividing the world into time zones,