After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity. In 2007, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, asked that he not be given any information about his APOE gene, one allele of which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Most people tell pollsters that, given the choice, they would prefer not to know the date of their own death--or even the future dates of happy events. Each of these is an example of willful ignorance.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity. In 2007, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, asked that he not be given any information about his APOE gene, one allele of which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Most people tell pollsters that, given the choice, they would prefer not to know the date of their own death--or even the future dates of happy events. Each of these is an example of willful ignorance.

This article introduces Nautilus' month-long exploration of the science and art of time. When Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn was re-launched to great fanfare at my home in 2015, it accelerated a discussion he and I had been having for years: What if we gathered together a group of creative, broad-thinking artists and scientists whose perspectives on time were directly reflected in their work? What an extraordinary opportunity that would be--to journey down the path of time hand-in-hand with people whose work has literally changed the way we see and hear things. So that's what we did. Lee's remarkable ability to think about time in a both a fundamental and historical context, and to communicate his ideas to a broad audience, informed our choice of writers and the direction we gave them.