A brief post on Time

We have a funny way of thinking. We talk about things that happened in the past, things that are happening now, and things that will happen in the future. But if you think too hard about how we compartmentalize Time, you start to question the categories.

The past is past, we say to ourselves, as if it were a fixed thing. But it's anything but. When scientists excavate the ruins of some mysterious ancient civilization, isn't that civilization now vitally "new" with the knowledge it has to impart to us through its ruins? And how can we say the Crusades of the Middle Ages are a thing of the past when we are still seen as occupying infidels in the Middle East today? 

The present is just as hard to pin down. When does the present begin and end? Is it a second, like the one that just passed? Or is it a centisecond (a hundredth of a second), or even smaller, a millisecond? Maybe it's something larger -- a year, two years, a decade. If there is no acceptable definition of what makes up the present, how can we know it exists?

The future is a funny thing, too. We are worried and excited about it. We are always planning for it. We are constantly thinking about it, imagining it, even though it doesn't yet exist. And it never will. That's the thing about the future; it's always in the future.

So what we call the past, the present, and the future doesn't stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Maybe one day those artificial distinctions will fall away and we'll realize that Time is an infinity of concentric circles and not an arrow going only in one direction.