Running for 200 years, the CHRISTMAS LECTURES were started by Michael Faraday to inspire and engage young people with science, and this year theoretical physicist, broadcaster and author, Jim Al-Khalili, will investigate what time actually is, and reveal why it remains one of science’s most tantalising and mysterious topics. 

Across three lectures, physicist, broadcaster and author, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, will tackle the awe-inspiring science of time, investigating a series of mind-melting questions: Does time have a direction? Have humans already time travelled? Is the future all mapped out? Did time exist before the Big Bang? Does time even exist at all? And why are our heads ageing faster than our feet?! 

Jim will bring this amazing science to life through a series of dynamic and explosive demos – and with some surprising expert guests. We’ll turn a member of the audience into a time traveller during an ingenious experiment with a light and a chair on rails. Jim will blow up a Christmas pudding – and then ask an audience member to rebuild it – to help explain why time can’t travel backwards. And we’ll meet the scientists using the latest telescopes to look back in time to the very birth of the universe. 

From sundials to water clocks, fire clocks to atomic clocks, Jim will chart the evolution of how humans measure time – tracing the 24-hour day back to ancient Egypt and our 60-minute hours back to ancient Mesopotamia. He’ll investigate why Greenwich became the location from where all time is measured and how revolutionary France attempted to introduce the 10-hour day and 100-minute hour! Plus he’ll reveal why the clocks on GPS satellites run faster than clocks based on Earth. 

Jim will reveal how Einstein’s Theory of Relativity revolutionised our understanding of time – and showed that there was no universal clock that ticks at the same rate across the universe. (We’ll discover how scientists proved this in 1971 by flying atomic clocks in opposite directions around the world – the clocks that flew east lost 59 nanoseconds while the ones that flew west gained 273 nanoseconds…) Jim will get festive as he attempts to plot the position of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future in the Block Universe – a model of spacetime where time is the fourth dimension and where past, present and future appear to co-exist simultaneously. And he’ll argue that quantum mechanics ultimately confirms that “the arrow of time” – and the idea that time can only move forwards – is baked into the structure of our universe. He’ll also answer once and for all whether time travel is possible… (While travel into the past is more problematic – unless multiverses exist – travel into the future is relatively easy as long as we have a super-fast spaceship…)   

With special guests from the fields of psychology and zoology, Jim will also explore our internal body clock and how humans and other animals perceive time – and whether teenagers really do exist in a different time zone… Could fewer new experiences as we get older explain why time appears to go faster as we age? Why does time appear to slow down during an accident or dramatic event?  How do our pets know that it’s dinner time? And could smaller animals be experiencing time in slow motion, compared to us humans?  

Only time (and Jim) will tell…