The Relative Nature of Time

[tuku747]

In our everyday experience, “time” is anything but static—it is an unstoppable flow. When most people talk about time, they are talking about a sequence of events that changes from moment to moment in our awareness. This is “evolution time,” time as experienced by consciousness, the ever-changing “now.” 

Albert Einstein Illustrated the relative nature of the perception of time through one of his famous thought experiments.

Imagine you are sitting in the middle of a train, while your friend is standing on the embankment outside, watching the train go roaring by. If lightning strikes on both ends of the train just as the train's midpoint is passing the embankment, your friend would see the two bolts of lightning strike at the same time, because both strikes are the same distance from him, the observer. If asked, he would say the strikes happen simultaneously—an accurate statement of his perception of time.

However from your perspective, sitting in the middle of the train as it moves forward, you will see the lightning that strikes in the front of the train first, because the light of the lightning in the rear has a slightly greater distance to travel to you. As a result, if asked, you would say the lightning strikes were not simultaneous, and that the one in the front actually happened first—an accurate statement of your perception of time.

In this, and other thought experiments, Einstein showed that time actually moves differently for someone in motion then for someone in rest; time only exists relative to each observer. In the case of the train and the lightning, neither your observation nor your friend's is "more correct"—there is simply no objective viewpoint, just two different peceptions.

For Einstein, such time was imaginary. When in 1955 he learned of his lifelong friend Michele Besso’s death, he famously wrote to Besso’s family, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

So while you and I may be experiencing the same moment simultaneously, it's still possible that our alternate perspectives may have us disagreeing on the order of events, shattering any objective notion of time. What we share is Presence, true simultinatiety, in which you can simply feel the pulse of my heart beating, this very moment. ? 

Edited July 18, 2023 by tuku747

[Inliytened1]

@tuku747 he should have said "people like us, who believe in physics, realized that their beliefs were imaginary, right along side physics.  And that even they themselves were imaginary.   Imagination is absolutely encompassing.  It engrosses all that you have seen, and all you will ever see - including the eyes from which you see it from.  Only that which realizes this is the source of this Imagination.  

That would have been Einstein the Mystic- not Einstein the physicist.