from attempts to ensure certainty and predictability by keeping time, real time, out of the formal explanatory systems. To a large extent, in the practice of everyday science, these developments have been ignored. Science continues to focus on those areas where certainty seems to be attainable. However, many of the most interesting and important problems are ones that grow out of the uncertainties that have been uncovered over the past century: problems like the origin and nature of life, the nature of creative processes, and the origin of novel processes and entities. These tend to be treated discursively rather than scientifically. However, we believe that it is now possible to develop formal treatments of problems like these by including time — real, natural time rather than any formal representation of it — in the explanatory mechanism. This will also mean recognising that a certain degree of uncertainty and unpredictability is inherent in any scientific treatment of these problems. But that would be a strength rather than a failure, because uncertainty and indeterminacy are inherent characteristics of these systems, and so any explanatory mechanism that doesn’t generate an appropriate degree of unpredictability is a misrepresentation. Creativity itself cannot be timeless, but 