ElI5: What Einstein meant by “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
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One of the core insights of Einstein’s work is that he dispenses with “space” and “time” as separate things, and considers them as just one thing: “spacetime”.
What one person calls time, another person might call space, based on how they’re moving. The reason this calls into question the nature of the past and future is because we generally think of all points in space as coexisting; the “spacetime” concept forces us to generalize this. For Einstein and most people who have interpreted relativity since his day, time, like space (indeed exactly like space, since they are the same), is laid out such that all moments coexist. Even though there *seems* to be a “present” that is singled out as a privileged moment in time, in reality there is no such thing. All moments are “happening” “simultaneously”, to borrow some annoyingly temporal terms.
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