Is Time Slowing Down?

The assumption among scientists has been that, except for situations in which special or general relativity applies, time always flows at a constant rate. A hundred years today is the same as a hundred years a billion years ago. Now, apparently, there are some dissenters from this view who think that time is actually slowing down:

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether.

The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether.

If this is true then was time passing much more quickly in the distant past such that an event which, say, takes an hour to complete today might have taken only a minute to complete a billion years ago? If so, if a billion years in today's time is much longer than a billion years at the time of the universe's inception what does that do to claims that the universe is thirteen billion years old?

What is time anyway? Is time something "out there," objective, such that were there no minds to experience it it would still exist? Or is time, as Kant thought, a way our mind processes experience so that were there no minds there'd be no time?

If it's the latter, if time is a subjective phenomenon, then until human beings (or at least minds of some sort) appeared in the universe there would have been no time. There would have been only events occurring willy-nilly compressed in a timeless matrix perhaps like data compressed in a zip-file.

If that's so then to ask how much time elapsed from the Big Bang to the appearance of minds is a nonsense question. There was no time. It's as if all the events recorded on a movie film are run through the projector at near infinite speed. All the events happen and they all happen in the same relation to each other but they do so instantaneously.

To ask the question, then, about the age of the universe is to ask simply how long it would have taken to go from the Big Bang to the appearance of minds if someone was somehow observing the process.

It's all very strange.