Time, Relativity, and the Mayfly Self

The Physics of Time

 

Even before Einstein, physics was never really supportive of our common-sense ideas about time. Humankind has long believed that the past and the future are very different, the one over, done with, fixed, the other ahead, open, malleable. The past keeps gaining new territory from the future across the boundary of the present. The calendar date of tomorrow becomes that of today, then of yesterday. All this seems to force upon us the conclusion that now is something that moves. 

Science, with physics at its base, has been a great success in explaining the phenomena of our world: thunder, billiards, fire, elevators, airplanes, the ability of fish to swim and viruses to infect. What did Newtonian physics have to tell us about this moving now? Nothing. The equations of physics contain variables for time, t₁, t₂, even t₀, but no “now.” 

With Einstein, physics stopped being unhelpful regarding our shared sense that the now moves, and became hostile, or at least unfriendly.

Two (or More) Moving Spotlights of Time

There is something special about this moment: that it is now.  We talk about the “flow” of time, are tempted to say “the now moves” and may find appealing the analogy of a spotlight sweeping across a series of pictures. I am not, here and now, going to defend the, philosophically controversial, moving spotlight theory. What I am going to do is to show that we could have evidence, not decisive evidence but pretty good evidence, that there were two or more spotlight nows moving along the timeline, and perhaps moving at different speeds, or even in different directions.