By “time is real” I mean to say that everything we experience and know about is caught in time, is caught in a moment, is not an illusion.  It’s the deepest clue we have, perhaps, to the nature of reality. 

This is to counterpose the picture which was developed in physics from Galileo and Newton and Descartes down to the present quantum cosmologists: that time is an illusion, time is an auxiliary; that reality is behind this veil of illusion, is timeless, is permanent, is outside of time. As Einstein and many other people have said, our experience of the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion and reality is just the whole history of the world at once.

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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