But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time
deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. W. H. Auden It is hard to think of
a subject as rich, complex, and important as time. From the practical
point of view it governs and organizes our lives (most of us are after
all attached to a wrist watch) or it helps us to wonderfully ?nd our way
in unknown territory with the global positioning system (GPS). More
generally it constitutes the heartbeat of modern technology. Time is the
most precisely measured quantity, so the second de?nes the meter or the
volt and yet, nobody knows for sure what it is, puzzling philosophers,
artists, priests, and scientists for centuries as one of the enduring
enigmas of all cultures. Indeed time is full of contrasts: taken for
granted in daily life, it requires sophisticated experimental and
theoretical treatments to be accurately "produced. " We are trapped in
its web, and it actually kills us all, but it also constitutes the stuff
we need to progress and realize our objectives. There is nothing more
boring and monotonous than the tick-tock of a clock, but how many
fascinating challenges have physicists met to realize that monotony:
Quite a number of Nobel Prize winners have been directly motivated by
them or have contributed 1 signi?cantly to time measurement.
