You might be surprised if we say that it is possible for your past, present and future to exist simultaneously.
At this very moment you are being born, reading this article and dying on your deathbed.
At first you will dismiss this idea as nonsense, but modern science has provided us with so much knowledge about the nature of reality that such a concept of the passage of time actually makes sense. Think of the universe as a child drawing on paper with markers.
Each image shows everything happening in the universe at one moment. With each new moment, all kinds of things happen everywhere – people are born and die, galactic civilizations expand, you read 7th days … The “child” then creates a new image that replaces the old one, so we get something like a movie.
A different approach
Only the moment we are in is real. Each moment is replaced by the next. The past is far behind us, now it is gone. The future hasn’t been drawn yet, so it doesn’t exist… We all feel the passage of time that way. Isn’t that right?
But what if time is something else entirely?
What if the “child” has already finished all his drawings and is just stacking them on top of each other? In this way we get a “time block” that contains the entire history of the universe – all the moments that have ever existed or will exist. But in that block, in that bunch of moments, the past, present, and future are equally real and exist at the same time.
Of course, this may seem wrong to you. The only moments we experience as real are the ones happening now. So how can the past and the future be real right now? The answer lies, as expected, in the theory of relativity.
Simply, relativity says that time and space are not separate, but that they are parts of the same phenomenon, which in science we call space-time (eng. spacetime). When you move through space, you also move through time, that is. “block images”. This means that time passes differently for different people, depending on how they move through space with each other.
It also means that what one experiences as “now” is a certain cross-section along the length of the block – a cross-section that will depend on how fast it is moving.
So what you think is “now” is really only “your now”, while there are many different “nows” in the universe and they are all equally real. This also means that there is no universal past or future. If you’re confused, it’s time to use another graphical example.
Imagine three alien spaceships a million light years away from you, that is, from Earth.
The first simply floats in space and does not move relative to you. You are both experiencing the same “now”, the same present. If you had some magical internet connection, you could instantly make a video call and discuss the political relations of our galaxy.
The other craft is moving away from you at a speed of 30 km/s, which is about three times faster than our rockets. Therefore, she moves through the time block differently than you do, which means her “now” is different from yours. Those aliens can use the same magical internet to talk to your ancestors since 1924, when humanity was discovering the first galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
A third spaceship is moving at the same speed but heading towards you. He is experiencing another “now” so that his passengers can talk to your descendants in the year 2124, who live in a colony on Mars.
The question now arises as to which of the three different “nows” is real. That’s the problem: all three are real.
Cosmic democracy
Relativity is based on a powerful principle that some scientists call “cosmic democracy.” It says that the viewpoint of all observers in the universe is equally valid. Each “now” must be equally real. If so, that means your past, present and future must exist at the same time – right now – because for different aliens, each happens in their present.
This means that the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion. The universe is not a bunch of events unfolding over time, like in a movie, but a static block in which past, present and future coexist and are continuously real.
There is an analogy. Some galaxies are located outside the visible universe. They are so far away that not only will you never be able to visit them, but in theory you won’t even know they exist. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. The future may work the same way.
If the past is not far behind us, and the future really exists, then there is no “movie”. Things don’t happen in space. The universe simply “is”, like a frozen block of dead cosmic ice with everything that will ever happen already written and decided.
From this arises the question of free will. If all times coexist and are equally real, then the future must already be written. But we don’t think that’s the case. On the contrary, it seems to us that we can shape our own future with our own
