Imagine yourself enclosed in a narrow cubi­cle in which you are hardly able to move. The very idea of such an imprisonment makes you feel suffocated. But you are imprisoned, even more exactly, in the present instant of time.

In spite of the fact that the present instant is in permanent motion towards the future, you are unable to free yourself from tight constraints of the present. You cannot go back to the past, because the past has already collapsed into nothingness; you cannot accelerate your run into the future, because the future still does not exist. You are living on the edge of the razor surrounded by the twofold abyss of void: the past and the future.

Ancient Greeks believed that old Chronos was the absolute ruler of “gods and people”. Is the tyranny of time an ontological neces­sity against which no rebellion is possible?

The first breach in Chronos’s iron power came from a quite unexpected side. Physics, the science of matter, was believed to be the most faithful enforcer in the service of Chronos; yet it was in physics that there appeared the first signs of rebellion.