Carte blanche to Anglesh Major | Is time an illusion?

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know it; if I want to answer this question, I ignore it.” – Saint Augustin

It may be morning, afternoon or evening. Some are going to work and others are coming back. It doesn’t matter, you take that time to open The Pressaccompanied by a coffee, a herbal tea or nothing at all. In any case, you take a moment for yourself, you are in the present moment.

The moment you read these first sentences is no longer valid. The moment you read this one has replaced the last one. And while you are reading this one, the previous one has sunk into the past. This little game could go on forever. When you have finished reading my text, a few minutes will have passed, of course. This is what gives us the impression that time is passing. In our deep thoughts, the future is somewhere until it becomes present. The past is past, the present has become past and the future has slipped into the present and is mysteriously part of the past. But what makes time move forward? What prevents us from remaining present in the same present moment? What forces us to follow the flow of time? Does time really exist? What is time… an illusion, a human invention?

Our daily experience of time seems obvious: we live, we age, and our calendars dictate our lives. However, a deeper reflection leads us to question the real nature of time.

Answering the question “what is time?” is still a great mystery today and the subject of heated debates, both in philosophy and in science. “Time” is a word that we use a lot in our everyday language and that has a very polysemic meaning. We use the concept of time to talk about simultaneity, a moment, change, succession, duration and speed. Many meanings for a simple word.

In the sentence “I’ll be there in 3 minutes” or “How long does it take to get to Australia?”, we are talking about a duration and not time. When we say “We are in 2024”, It is not a position in time, it simply means that 2024 years have passed since we started counting from the year zero (the year Jesus Christ was born). So, we could conclude that everyday language uses the notion of time a lot, without however saying what it really is. So, where does this concept of time come from?

In everyday life, the passing of time often evokes aging and death. But it is quite different for physicists and philosophers like Etienne Klein or Francis Wolff who have questioned both the origin and the nature of this concept. For them, time is completely indifferent to the perception we have of it. For our part, we all have the impression that it is time that is responsible for aging or death. Hair turns gray, objects move, the seasons follow one another in an endless waltz, but here again, we observe change rather than time.

In other words, it is not time itself that makes us age, but what happens inside us as time passes: biological phenomena, wear and tear of cells and organs, etc. We confuse time and temporal phenomena.

Francis Wolff, philosopher and professor emeritus at the ENS, explains that this is an observation that is often made when we wonder about time. “We never perceive time directly, but we perceive the indirect effects of these excessive manifestations. For example, when we wait too long or when we are surprised that it is already time. But time itself seems elusive.”

When we say that time passes, what is really happening? Some physicists believe that it is we, and only we, human beings with consciousness, who are the origin of this impression that time passes. Imagine that you are comfortably seated in a moving train and you watch the landscape pass by in front of you, you say to yourself: “Look, the landscape is passing by.” In reality, the landscape does not pass by, at least not by itself. It is the movement of the train in which you are sitting that creates the impression that the landscape is passing by, while it is frozen. If we follow this example, we could say that it is perhaps not time that passes, but we who flow into it.

In short, the question of whether time is an illusion opens a rich and complex debate. It confronts us with the complexity of our human experience and the mysteries of the universe. On the one hand, our perception of time, often subjective and influenced by our experiences, seems to suggest that it could be a mental construct. On the other hand, the laws of physics and our understanding of the material world indicate that time has an objective existence. One thing is certain: time, as complex as it may be, is part of us. Whether it is perceived as an illusion or a reality. It is an essential aspect of our human experience, influencing our choices, our memories and our perception of the world. So, how many minutes do you think have passed since you read the first lines?

What do you think? Express your opinion