ElI5: What Einstein meant by “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
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Physics understands cause and effect. You throw the ball and it flies. But halfway through the air the ball does not have to remember that it was thrown for it to fly. Physics also studies how things change over time, so it could measure or calculate the speed of the ball since you had thrown it.
How you experience time is very different. You experience the world and you say this is “now”. This becomes your time zero. You remember from before, and you plan for what is to come. But this is very personal, it’s in your mind.
At what personal time you experience the ball moving does not change how it moves. The moment you start doing physics and it’s about a “description of the world” and not an “experience of the world”, you no longer have a “now”. You have time flowing, and cause and effect. You can put your time zero wherever you like.
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