One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

Studies of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself. In 2013, a masters student in physics named Paul Erker went ...

Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and ...