ElI5: What Einstein meant by “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”.
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I see it as an extension of his theory of relativity, time being relative to movement in space. The one you’re mentioning is called the block universe theory, but it’s not Einstein who came up with it. I think Einstein was a pantheist which may have some basis on platonism, idealitic dualism (which is what Christianity was founded on) which is a theory that the true nature of existence is immaterial which super-ordinates our physical unviverse. I kinda have this belief myself, but I don’t necessarily believe in an intelligent design behind it. However, pantheism does subsume agnosticism (in a lot of people). There’s a theory that I heard from David Chalmer’s ted talk, that experience might be fundamental in nature like time and space, relative to those as well in similar fashion. In a way, it is you know… Another cool ted talk about consciousness is Antonio D’Amasio’s. I’m taking a class on it, the neuroscience of consciousness, and he seems to have a spotlight in it.
You can’t really draw a line between when exactly the past stops and present begins or vice versa.
Dr. Brian Greene explains and demonstrates this concept of “spacetime” in this PBS Nova series based on his book called The Fabric of the Cosmos. This video is on the illusion of time. Relevant part quoting Einstein’s “past, present, and future” starts around the 19 min mark. The whole series is a great watch. Dr. Greene has a bunch of great videos and documentaries about physics. Everything has happened, is happening, and will happen all at the same time 🙂 https://www.pbs.org/video/nova-the-fabric-of-the-cosmos-the-illusion-of-time/
Have you been reading Recursion?
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.
Comments still have not ELI5 the block universe concept that Einstein was referring to. That is because it can be complicated and would take a lot of time to write up and describe. Instead here is a video that ELI5 the concept very well:
Does the Past Still Exist? by Sabine Hossenfelder
Description:
Albert Einstein taught us that space and time belong together to a common entity: space-time. This means that time becomes a dimension, similar to space, and has profound consequences for the nature of time. Most importantly it leads to what has been called the block universe, a universe in which all moments of time exist the same way together. The future, the present, and the past are the same, it is just our perception that suggests otherwise.
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.
Imagine a film reel. As you watch the movie, you can only experience each frame of the movie as it happens. However, if you go to the projector and pop out the reel, you can see that each frame exists all at once on the reel. The “past, present, and future” of the movie exists all at once and the way that we watch the movie is the illusion.
If I can put it in layman’s terms, as I understand it: I belive it was the comedian Steven Wright who said “time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once”.
well, that was stated as a joke but if you think about the “speed of light” as the speed of reality, what that means is that everything that ever did happen or will happen IS going on somewhere. We just don’t all find out about it at the same rate. A thing that happens near us, we know about it after a very short wait because its effects reach us fast. a thing that’s happening really far away, the sensory evidence of it only arrives later because it has to ripple outward for a long way. so time is really a built-in part of distance, and distance is just how long it takes to notice reality.
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