Is time an illusion?

Wired, Issue 15.02 - February 2007

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions.html?pg=3&topic=bigquestions&topic_set=

Plato argued that time is constant 

- it’s life that’s the illusion. 

Galileo shrugged over the philosophy of time 

and figured out how to plot it on a graph 

so he could get on with the important physics. 

Albert Einstein said that time 

is just another dimension, 

a fourth one to go along 

with the up-down, side-side, 

forward-back we move through every day. 

Our understanding of time, Einstein said, 

is based on its relationship to our environment. 

Weirdly, the faster you travel, 

the slower time moves. 

The most radical interpretation of his theory: 

Past, present, and future are merely figments 

of our imagination, constructs built by our brains 

so that everything doesn’t seem to happen at once.

Einstein’s conception of unified spacetime 

works better on graph paper than in the real world.

Time isn’t like those other dimensions 

- for one thing, we move only one way within it. 

“What’s needed is not to make the notion of time 

and general relativity work or to go back 

to the notion of absolute time, but to invent 

something radically new,” says Lee Smolin, 

a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. 

Somebody is going to get it right eventually. 

It’ll just take time.

- Erin Biba, San Francisco-based writer