ElI5: What Einstein meant by “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
In: 1101
Because light travels at a fixed speed, people very far away from each other will see things happen at different times.
Because of this, theoretically, if you could teleport vast distance instantly, you could see (or do) an event in ‘real time’, and then blink millions of miles away, and watch it happen all over again at a distance.
Therefore, chronology is relative to distance, and so the idea that everything everywhere is happening at the same time is not only useless, but fundamentally incorrect. It is just a ‘stubborn illusion’.
This gets weirder when gravity gets involved, but we’re already way beyond an ELI5 question there.
Edit: Technically it’s speed that makes time go funky as well, but I’m too sick for a special relativity ELI5.
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