I’ve seen a lot of physics videos and a friend tried to explain to my brain can’t understand why time is just a perception.
In: Physics
You may be thinking of Einstein’s use of the phrase “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” What he means is that all of space time – from the big bang to however things “end” – exists fully and completely all at once. Things don’t “come into being” in the future or recede into the past – that’s just an illusion. All of it exists right now, has since the beginning of space time, and never goes away. We just “travel” through it, and it is only our experience that makes it seem as if there’s a difference between past and future, and hence an experience of “time.”
Think of the entirety of spacetime as being a giant loaf of bread – at one crust slice is the start of spacetime, and the other crust slice is the end of spacetime. But the entire loaf exists all at once and came out of the oven fully baked – it’s not changing at all. Imagine a tiny ant starting at the beginning crust and eating it’s way through in a straight line from one end to the other. It can’t back up and it can’t change it’s pace. It can only move steadily forward and with each bite it can only get sensory input from the part of the loaf it’s sensory organs are touching. To the ant, it seems that each moment is unique, and while it may remember the moments from behind it, it hasn’t yet experienced the moments to come. It seems there’s a difference in the past and future, but the loaf is already there on both ends. Now what makes it weirder is that the ant itself is baked into the loaf from start to finish so in a sense it’s merely “occupying” a new version of itself from one moment to the next. This also isn’t quite right, since it’s more accurate to say that the ant is a collection of all the separate moments the ant experiences. It’s not an individual creature making it’s way from one end to the other – it’s the entire “history” of the creature from start to finish.
Conceptually difficult to grasp with our limited minds, and this has serious repercussions for the concept of free will, but those are different subjects for different discussions.
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