Albert Einstein famously expressed this point when he wrote to a friend, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” Einstein's startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. Obvious though this commonsense description may seem, it is seriously at odds with modern physics. In this simple picture, the “now” of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present-and thence relegating them to the fixed past.
The past we think of as having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. Reality is associated with the present moment. The grammatical structure of language revolves around this fundamental distinction. In daily life we divide time into three parts: past, present and future. How can something so basic to our experience of the physical world turn out to be a case of mistaken identity? Or is there a key quality of time that science has not yet identified? Time Isn't of the Essence Some philosophers argue that the very notion of the passage of time is nonsensical and that talk of the river or flux of time is founded on a misconception. Indeed, physicists insist that time doesn't flow at all it merely is. Nothing in known physics corresponds to the passage of time. Shakespeare wrote of “the whirligig of time,” his countryman Andrew Marvell of “Time's winged chariot hurrying near.”Įvocative though these images may be, they run afoul of a deep and devastating paradox.
The passage of time has been compared to the flight of an arrow and to an ever rolling stream, bearing us inexorably from past to future. And who could doubt that it does? The passage of time is probably the most basic facet of human perception, for we feel time slipping by in our innermost selves in a manner that is altogether more intimate than our experience of, say, space or mass. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/old time is still a-flying.” So wrote 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick, capturing the universal cliché that time flies.
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