From the starting gun to the final whistle, time is central to our lives. We shape our days with diaries and timetables, even if the trains do not always take note. Yet the nature of time itself is elusive and unknown. A new year begins, and we get older, but however closely we look we cannot observe time, only its passing. Time is equally puzzling to science. Central to its laws from Newton to Einstein, science is unable to describe time itself. Strangely, in the so-called