Is time an illusion?

Time has fascinated philosophers and scientists for centuries, and its nature has sparked much controversy. From Plato, who saw it as an illusion, to Galileo, who attempted to capture its essence in diagrams, to Einstein, who revised our understanding of time as a fourth dimension. Contemporary theories, including Stephen Hawking's concept of entropy, indicate that our perception of time is inextricably linked to the order and chaos of the universe.

Time is an illusion

Plato argued that time is constant—life is an illusion. Galileo disregarded the philosophy of time and attempted to graph it, attempting to reconcile it with physics. Albert Einstein said that time is just another, fourth dimension in which we move daily. Our understanding of time, Einstein said, is based on its relationship to our environment.

It seems strange that the faster you travel, the slower time passes. The most radical interpretation of Einstein's theory is this: the past, present, and future are merely figments of our imagination, creations of our brains designed to prevent everything from seeming instantaneous.

Einstein's concept of unified spacetime works better on paper charts than in the real world. Time isn't like other dimensions—it's designed for one thing, and we move through it in only one way. "What's needed isn't to create the concept of time and general relativity, or to return to the concept of absolute time; we need to invent something radically new," says Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, USA.

Others, including renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, note that time is defined by entropy. This means that the universe, in its current expanding direction, is becoming increasingly disorganized—entropy increases and has existed ever since the universe's inception, just as time has. In this way, time can be conceptualized as a measure of entropy in the universe.

Someday, some scientist will finally discover the truth. It just takes a little time.