"Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?" âAn hour, once it l
âThe nature of reality that spills forth from Einsteinâs physics is so much more startling than the simplistic, undergraduate-beloved shibboleth: everything is relative to subjective points of view. In Einsteinâs physics, there is no passage of time, no unidirectional flow from the fixed past and toward the uncertain future. The temporal component of space-time is as static as its spatial components; physical time is as still as physical space. It is all laid out, the whole spread of events, in the tenseless four-dimensional space-time manifold...
The distinctions we make between the past and the present and the future â distinctions which are so emotionally fraught and without which we canât even begin to describe our inner worlds â only have relevance within those inner worlds. Objective time, as it is characterized in relativity, canât support the distinction between the past and the present and the future. Or, as Einstein told [philosopher and Vienna Circle member] Rudolf Carnap, âthe experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics...
The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths â even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision â are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.â










