Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 360.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-03-10 08:58:42+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: time?

Apologies for the following lengthy note. Experience has shown, 
however, that venturing them here is often not in vain. So here goes.

Stephen Hawking's book, A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion. The Essential
Scientific Works of Albert Einstein (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009),
takes its title--without reference--from Einstein's concluding sentence
in a letter of condolence to the son and wife of his close friend
Michele Besso: "Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen
Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer wenn auch
hartnäckigen Illusion." (For us, as devout physicists, the distinction
between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent
illusion.)*

In his Foreword to Lincoln Barnett's The Universe and Dr. Einstein
(1948), Einstein praises the book for avoiding the two great errors in
popular accounts of abstract scientific subjects (obscuring their core
in order to be intelligible; alienating the reader by giving an expert
account). The importance of getting it right, and so presenting the
subject simply (but not too simply) is, he says, that, "Restricting the
body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a
people and leads to spiritual poverty." I pick out an example from the
book, on how we think about time:

> Obviously the astronomer has to think of the universe as a space-
> time continuum. When he peers through his telescope he looks not
> only outward in space but backward in time. His sensitive cameras
> can detect the glimmer of island universes 500 million light years
> away-faint gleams that began their journey at a period of
> terrestrial time when the first vertebrates were starting to crawl
> from warm Paleozoic seas onto the young continents of Earth. His
> spectroscope tells him, moreover, that these huge outer systems
> are hurtling into limbo, away from our own galaxy, at incredible
> velocities ranging up to 35,000 miles a second. Or, more precisely,
> they were receding from us 500 million years ago. Where they are
> "now," or whether they even exist "now," no one can say. If we break
> down our picture of the universe into three subjective dimensions of
> space and one of local time, then these galaxies have no objective
> existence save as faint smudges of ancient enfeebled light on a
> photographic plate. They attain physical reality only in their
> proper frame of reference, which is the four-dimensional space-time
> continuum. (p. 66)

I would enormously appreciate any references to other writings on time
that allow us to think better about the 'future', hence about
cultural/historical worlds in which predicting this future is taken
seriously.

Thanks!
WM

*Albert Einstein and Michele Besso, Correspondance 1903-1955, 
trans. and ed. by Pierre Speziali (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 215 (E. 98), 
p. 538.
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php