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 an audiobook for anyone who has ever glanced at a clock and wondered whether it was telling the truth.