This time tomorrow...

Monuments are being built over centuries, manuscripts locked away for future generations. See how some of humanity's most dramatic creative projects explore our bond with time

- K Narayanan

There's a verse in the Atharva Veda that goes: "Kalo ha sarvasyesvaro ya pitasit prajapate tenesita tena jata tad u tasmin pratis hitam" or "Time is truly the god of all; he was the father of the Creator; by time is the world sent forth, produced and established."

All things flow from Time. In physics, it is the fourth dimension, unique in its asymmetry. All things flow within Time. That may explain the human obsession with it.

It is measurable, yet uncontrollable. Not wild. But inexorable. And symbolic.

It was this symbolic power that Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire, sought to harness when he brought back a 30-metre Egyptian obelisk of red granite, after defeating Cleopatra's army in the 1st century BCE, and used it as a giant gnomon (the part of the sundial that casts the shadow).

The obelisk was reflected across a pavement of marble and bronze. It was a symbol of the Pax Romana, the golden age.

Nearly 2,000 years later, in 1851, workmen embedded a bronze strip in the grounds of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, under the direction of astronomer George Biddell Airy, to mark that the prime meridian passed through London, the seat of the greatest empire the world had known.