“For more than two thousand years, the world’s great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured – and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?” Adam Burdick argues that the first thinker we know of who got it right was St. Augustine.