Time,

Inara Verzemnieks: In 1905, on an isthmus along the Willamette River, an amusement park opened -- "a combination of reformed Coney Island and a Parisian cafe," the newspaper proclaimed -- and inside its grounds, a carousel began to turn.



Coincidentally, the very next month of that very same year, a young patent clerk in Switzerland published a revolutionary theory about space and time that would have people scratching their heads well into the next century. His work suggested that time is not a steady march from past to present to future -- that it is, in fact, much more elastic. Under this new reckoning of time, past, present and future can actually exist simultaneously.



What could…