The Real Meaning of the New Conception of Time

Abstract

THE fascinating presidential address of Dr. Jeans to the Royal Astronomical Society, published in NATURE for February 27, with its poetical allusions to children chasing a rainbow over the hills, and to what seems the successive extinction of the shires as one gazes at the country from the windows of an express, must have helped many of us to make fast our hold upon the principles of the general theory of relativity. Yet it is doubtful whether the full implications for the doctrine are generally realised—of such a statement, for example, as “The year 1927 has the same sort of existence as the county of Cornwall.” The legitimate inference surely amounts to nothing less momentous than this: that everything that has ever existed or happened, or that ever will exist or happen, in the universe, is immanent in physical space-time or ‘ether’; and that what to us participators in the drama being enacted on the space-time stage appears to be the special differentiation of the present—of now—from the past and the future, is merely an illusion due to our experiencing changes in a certain dimension of the four-dimensional continuum, which imparts the impression of travelling along that dimension and hence the idea of flowing time.