The Illusion of Time

According to the equations of relativity that were developed by Albert Einstein — which have been verified many times — if you and I are traveling at different velocities, then something that happened in my past can happen in your future and something that happened in your past can happen in my future. For ordinary, real-world events and velocities, the effect is tiny and would take a very sensitive instrument to detect. However, that isn’t the point. The fact that it happens at all is the point. If something in my past can happen in your future, and vice versa, it means that the past has to be real and the future has to be real. It doesn’t matter whether it happens a day into your future or a microsecond into your future — either way it happens in your future. That means the past isn’t the “dead past”; it exists. And the future isn’t imaginary; it exists, too.

According to a group of esteemed physicists, time is an illusion — a human construct. Our illusion of time is due to the fact that our brain contains memories. Without memories, our lives would seem to be a series of “nows” with no past and therefore no future. These physicists insist the past and the future are as real as the present. They exist now, but we can only perceive the present. We can’t visit the past and we can’t visit the future, but that fact doesn’t make them any less real than the now.

We experience the “now” as, instant by instant, our consciousness moves through 4-dimensional spacetime. We have the illusion that the past is over and done with, and the future is yet to be. But no. The past and the future are as real as the now, and they exist in the same way that the now exists. The fact that we can no longer experience the past and cannot yet experience the future does not make them unreal or imaginary. It just makes them inaccessible.

None of this surprises me. I’ve often maintained that reality is not only stranger than we know, it’s stranger than we can know. In the universe of intelligent beings, we’re babies. We left our caves and invented civilization only a few thousand years ago. Perhaps if humans survive another hundred thousand years, we might evolve brains that have a chance at understanding reality more fully than we do now. If a denizen of that far-off time could visit us to explain reality, he would have as much success as we would have at explaining quantum physics to a troglodyte. We live in ignorance, clueless about all the things we don’t know.