New Agendas for the Study of Time: Connecting the Disciplines

Nothing is more fundamental than time in human life. Yet time remains profoundly mysterious. Some of its deepest puzzles issue from the fact that it isn’t clear just where, across a very wide range of intellectual enquiry, it is best investigated. Some aspects certainly belong to physics. But even within physics, there is deep disagreement about which aspects of the ordinary view of time we should expect to find in physical theory. Our project has four core aims: (1) To provide the global research community with new clarity about what belongs where, across the academic disciplines, in the study of time; (2) To identify specific topics needing cross-disciplinary work – the frontiers in the study of time where specialists in one field need insights from other fields, in order to make progress; (3) To seed and advance the needed cross-disciplinary interactions, by bringing together leading specialists in the project of setting the agenda for future research; (4) To apply the project’s own methodology to make progress on topics which are presently impeded by lack of access to cross-disciplinary perspectives. The overriding objective of the project is thus to give researchers from a range of disciplines a deeper understanding of what aspects of the study of time fruitfully belong to their own discipline, and how those aspects both relate to, and are distinct from, the issues that belong to other disciplines. In achieving this, we will bring a new clarity to the study of time, in its most global sense; and set the agenda for the future of the subject, in a way that would be impossible without this project’s interdisciplinary imperative.