Introduction

In Week 4 you looked at the limits of space, and whether the universe could be infinite. This week, you will look more closely at what’s meant by ‘time’ and how it’s connected to space. Then you‘ll look more deeply (very deeply, in fact!) into one place where it all changes, and we can already outline what we cannot know.

Here’s Marcus to introduce this week’s topic.

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• appreciate that the passage of time is related to how quickly one is moving
• understand the implications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity on gravity, space and the flow of time
• outline some of our current knowledge of black holes, their structure, and what happens inside them
• describe how general relativity clashes with quantum mechanics at the centre of a black hole, and what this means.