Everytime I try to read an explanation of both I don’t really understand the difference. Saying “this happened in the past” and “this happened before that” is just using different words to describe the exact same thing to me. I guess I’m also not understanding the implications of this distinction.
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“This happened in the past” implies that there is a special point in time, the present, that we are judging everything else relative to. And, importantly, the truth of the claim “this happened in the past” changes over time. At present, “the 2024 Olympics happened in the past” is false, but presumably at some point it will become true.
The B theory just places events relative to each other and does not privilege any particular time as “the present”.
And this is really just one building block of some philosophical viewpoints about time. The person who came up with the distinction (a guy with the incredible name of John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart) thought that neither of these perspectives makes sense and that time isn’t real. Since then, there have been many developments in physics that are relevant to this discussion, and philosophers’ views have shifted to take them into account.
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