The meaning of ‘now’ might seem rather obvious: it’s the state of awareness you’re experiencing at this very moment, of course.
The meaning of ‘now’ might seem rather obvious: it’s the state of awareness you’re experiencing at this very moment, of course. But as the UK science writer Jo Marchant details in this talk at the Royal Institution in London, when you dig into how different disciplines and cultures understand the ‘now’, it gets rather knotty. Borrowing from research for her bookIn Search of Now(2026), Marchant traverses philosophy, physics, psychology and anthropology, deconstructing the concept to show why the present is so hard to pin down. She then ends on a practical note, weaving the mystery of ‘now’ into an argument for stepping out of clock time and tuning in to your experience.