Shocker: Time is an illusion
You may have heard of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which in short means that space and time are relative, and they are intertwined with space, creating the fourth dimension. This might seem silly to you, but think about it.
Imagine you see a train that has tracks that go up and down. Now imagine if you told the train to shift right — that would be silly wouldn’t it? The train cannot move because it is confined to the tracks, which move up and down. To make a more extreme example, imagine a bug that can only travel in two dimensions, if you ask it to jump up, it wouldn’t know that up means. Even if it had a limited understanding of up and down, it could not fully know it because it is confined to two dimensions. The same applies for humans, we see and experience only three dimensions. It has been suggested that the fourth dimension is time, and using our limited understanding of it, it can be speculated that time is merely an illusion.
According to Einstein, time is not a fixed constant, but instead it is affected by speed and gravity. According to Einstein, time doesn’t flow the same for everyone, for example:
- Time Dilation: If one travels at velocities close to the velocity of light, time is going slower for them compared to one who is at rest. This experimentally confirmed fact is that clocks onboard spaceships flying fast run slower compared to Earth-bound clocks.
- Gravitational Time Dilation: Time also slows down in stronger gravitational fields. Close to a massive body like a black hole, time stretches out so much that what may seem like minutes to the observer near the event horizon would take years to go by for an observer very far away.
This suggests that our time depends on our motion and gravity, and in other words, time could act differently for other people.
Since relativity holds true, it is proposed that the past, present, and future exist at the same time (this is also called eternalism). Imagine the universe as a piece of bread, where each slice of bread represents a moment of time. To us, the present is the only real slice to us, even though there are pieces of bread before and after it. Just as all the slices exist, all moments in time do too.
Eternalism, while puzzling, raises some questions about our free will. Many might think that we are just following some prewritten script, and many might lose hope thinking that an ending is already set, no matter how hard we try. However, I like to think that the future already knows what choices we will ultimately make, and through our choices, we shape our own future.
While eternalism is a very confusing physiological question, even to the best of their fields, it is still an interesting thing to talk about. In fact, the theory of relativity can be found in the movie Interstellar; when Cooper swings past the black hole, he “loses time” because gravity affects his own time. If you are curious to learn more about eternalism, I highly suggest you watch the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqmMoI0wks, because it explains it much better than I could.
