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Time May Be the Most Confounding Subject in Science
Our experience of time is so simple and settled that it doesn’t even register when suggestions are made that we don’t understand it. Of course we understand it. We are born, we live, we die. Only two things are certain: death and taxes. Time, Mark Twain sagely said, was something that kept everything from happening at once.
Nothing complicated about that. Until we start thinking about things like eternity. What is eternity? Is it endless time where things still happen in sequential order, where the past is behind us, the present is where we are, and the future is coming our way? Forever? Or is it timelessness, where multiple things can happen at once, or where we — our conscious awareness — can skip around visiting our great great grandparents one day and exploring the future a billion years away the next day?
The fact that it is easier for us to think of eternity as endless time shows how wedded we are to the concept of past, present and future — the linearity of time. But, as the conclusion of the TV series “The Good Place” showed (spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it), the idea of time without end results in such paralyzing boredom that ending the personal experience of time altogether becomes an inevitable choice.
In attempting to grasp this question, I wrote a post and produced a video that showed…
