‘This century is special’: Astronomer Royal Martin Rees on the vast span of time

IN OUR on a regular basis lives, time is a treasured commodity. We will achieve it or lose it. We will save, spend or waste it. If our crimes are revealed, we threat doing time.

However it’s, in fact, one thing we will measure. Certainly, clocks have, over the centuries, been the high-tech artefacts of their period – the water clock, the pendulum clock, Harrison’s chronometer, all the best way as much as the unbelievable precision of atomic clocks.

Earlier than there was a dependable calendar of…