Making Space for Time; January 2008; Scientific American Magazine; by Scott Dodd; 3 Page(s)

"Emoclew dna olleh," Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene said as he opened a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences last October. "If you understood that as 'Hello and welcome' in time reverse," he clarified, "you probably don't need to be here."

No one left. Many of the world's top theoretical physicists and cosmologists gathered at the conference to grapple with the mystery of how time works. New telescope observations and novel thinking about quantum gravity have convinced them that it is time to reexamine time. "We've answered classic questions about time by replacing them with other hard questions," says cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.