The Grand Illusion | Jim Holt

“Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.”

“I see the past, present, and future, existing all at once/Before me.”

Over here, you are being born; over there, you are celebrating the turn of the millennium; and over yonder, you’ve been dead for a while. Nothing is “flowing” from one event to another. As the mathematician Hermann Weyl memorably put it, “The objective world simply is; it does not happen.”

Our idea of time, Einstein realized, is abstracted from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the swinging of pendulums, the ticking of clocks. Time judgments always come down to judgments of what happens at the same time—of simultaneity. “If, for instance, I say, ‘That train arrives here at seven ... See more