The overthrowing of absolute time’s hegemony had manifold consequences: measuring rods behave differently in different reference frames, mass and energy are equivalent, there are events that cannot be causally related with each other. Although these effects are too tiny to be observed in everyday life, when in modern particle accelerators such as Cern – where one deals with velocities comparable to that of light – they dominate the scene, and one could do nothing without Einstein’s formulae.

Tyrants do not surrender easily. When Chronos noticed that he was losing, he decided to share his power with space. In 1908 Herman Minkowski formulated the Special Theory of Relativity in geometric terms. Time is relative but space-time is absolute, and Einstein’s Special Theory is nothing but the geometry of space-time.

Space-time does not “flow”, it exists “in one piece”. If so, it is perhaps our consciousness that, like a carriage wheel always touching the road at a single point, rolls along space-time and creates an illusion of a flowing time.

Only much later did Roger Penrose, by introducing the concept of bifurcating space-times, demonstrate that it is possible to reconcile the idea of becoming with the idea of space-time geometry.

In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the modern theory of gravity, space-time remains absolute, but it can bend in manifold ways depending on the matter distribution throughout the universe. Space-time curvature strongly intervenes in the process of decomposing space-time into space and time separately. This fact can play various tricks with our sense of time. We would agree that a process evolving in time, as viewed by an observer (a historian), deserves the name of history. The transitional character of time can truly be regarded as an ontological foundation of history. But now it depends on the curved space-time geometry.