In a pre‑lecture interview, Al‑Khalili criticised the ultra‑rich’s obsession with extending lifespan, citing tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s experiment of injecting his 17‑year‑old son’s plasma – a stunt Johnson later admitted produced no measurable benefit.
“We have a finite interval of time in which we exist in the universe,” Al‑Khalili told reporters. “The more I study the nature of time, the more I realise I just want to make the most of the time that I have.” He warned that spending that brief interval trying to stretch it to “two blinks of an eye” may not be a worthwhile pursuit.
Al‑Khalili, who will deliver the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures this December, said his fascination with time began in childhood when his engineer father told him that “no one really understood what time was”. He added that formal training in physics revealed how far everyday intuition is from the scientific concept of time.
Drawing on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the professor explained that time does not run at the same rate for everyone – a moving clock or a strong gravitational field can make a second feel longer or shorter. He used the example of a rocket flying past an observer to illustrate how two people can experience different durations for the same event.
The lectures will also explore the possibility of time travel, describing closed time‑like curves where space‑time is warped enough to loop back on itself. While Al‑Khalili acknowledged that most physicists deem backward time travel impossible because of paradoxes, he said forward‑in‑time travel is theoretically easier, citing the relativistic effect of slowing time near a supermassive black hole as depicted in the film *Interstellar*.
Another focus will be the “arrow of time” – why everyday processes run in one direction despite fundamental equations being time‑symmetric. Al‑Khalili hinted that he believes he has solved this long‑standing puzzle and will reveal his explanation during the talks.
The Christmas lectures, supported by CGI, will be broadcast on the BBC and streamed on iPlayer in late December, offering a public platform for Al‑Khalili’s reflections on time, ageing, and the limits of human ambition.