Researchers say time is an illusion. So why are we all obsessed with it?

"'Space-time is doomed,' says Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Arkani-Hamed has reached this conclusion over the past decade, as he's tried to gain a better understanding of what's happening inside the world's most powerful atom-smashers. These giant devices use huge amounts of energy to collide together subatomic particles. Calculating each collision as it happens should, according to quantum mechanics, require hundreds of pages of complex mathematics. Yet inexplicably, a much simpler equation can work just as well."

Read or listen at NPR.