ElI5: What Einstein meant by “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.

Question

ElI5: What Einstein meant by “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.

In: 1101

Answer 1

I read a good analogy of our perception of time written by Kurt Vonnegut, I think it was in *Slaughterhouse Five* but I’m not positive.

You’re strapped down on your back on a railroad flatcar moving along a track across a vast landscape. A long tube is fixed over your eyes so you can only look straight up through the narrow tube. You’re traveling through that world, but you can only perceive what passes your limited consciousness. To you nothing else exists, even though it is all there.

That, I think, is the illusion.