BEYOND TIME: FROM BERGSON TO THE SPINNING UNIVERSE

What if time is not something the universe runs on, but something the universe produces? For more than a century, Henri Bergson's notion of "duration" shaped how philosophers, artists, and psychologists thought about time. He won a Nobel Prize for it. He publicly challenged Einstein over it. And yet his beautiful metaphors never answered the most basic question: what actually is time? Beyond Time traces humanity's long struggle with this question-from Augustine's confessions and the temporal paradoxes encoded in ancient Hebrew grammar, through the neuroscience of why birthdays seem to accelerate and why five minutes in a dentist's chair lasts longer than an hour at a party, to the radical new physics suggesting that time is not a backdrop to reality but an emergent consequence of cosmic rotation. Drawing on philosophy, neurobiology, quantum mechanics, and original research in cosmology, Boris Kriger dismantles Bergson's poetic intuitions with surgical precision-and then goes further. If the universe began as a spinning manifold with all its velocity locked in rotation, then as that rotation slowed, something extraordinary was released: the passage of moments. Time is the freed velocity budget of a decelerating cosmos. We do not move through time. Time moves through us, because the universe is winding down. Written with wit, irreverence, and intellectual ambition, Beyond Time is a book for anyone who has ever glanced at a clock and wondered whether it was telling the truth. Keywords: time perception, philosophy of time, emergent time, cosmology, neuroscience of consciousness, Henri Bergson, quantum gravity