Time thoughts

 

 

By the end of his life, Albert Einstein was convinced that linear time didn't exist.  When his friend Michele Besso died in 1955, right before his own death, Einstein wrote the bereaved family:

This is not important. For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.  

This is called the "block universe" theory, meaning that space and time are four-dimensional, rather than unfolding in a linear way, as we like to think of our lives gently passing by in minutes, hours and days. This idea that time is an illusion didn't start with Einstein, although he had the science.

In Parmenides (one of the mind-twisting Dialogs of Plato) they make the argument that there is no such thing as change, because the entire universe is the set of all movements at once. Everything that ever happened, or ever will happen, is happening simultaneously, right now. Smart Greeks.

The Four Quartets, by T.S Eliot, is a complex poem that tackles the great mysteries of time, death and faith. It's one of my favorite poems and considered the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.  

From Burnt Norton, Four Quartets