Einstein’s Persistent Illusion

Albert Einstein famously wrote that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

He wrote this in a 1955 letter of condolence to the family of his friend Michele Besso after Besso’s death.

What he meant: from the perspective of relativity, time isn’t necessarily something that “flows” the way it feels to us. Past, present, and future may all be part of a larger spacetime structure, so our everyday sense that only the present is real could be more about human perception than about how the universe fundamentally works.

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