Editorial: "Solving the eternal mystery that is time"
IMAGINE standing outside the universe. Not just outside space, but outside time too. From this spectacular vantage point, you gaze down upon the universe. At one end you see its beginning: the big bang. At the other, you see... whatever it is that happens there. Somewhere in the middle is you, a minuscule worm: at one end a baby, the other end a corpse. From this impossible perspective, time does not flow, and there is no "now". Time is static. Immutable. Frozen.
Fantastical as it seems, for most physicists today the universe is just like that. We might think of time flowing from a real past into a not-yet-real future, but our current theories of space and time teach us that past, present and future are all equally real – and fundamentally indistinguishable. Any sense that our "now" is somehow special, ...
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