Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 365.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2026-03-12 20:50:59+00:00
From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.360: time and the future
Dear Willard,
The past and the future don't, of course, really exist. They
are places as we find in Fairy Stories and Fiction. Have you
ever been to these places? No. Do we ever talk about, read
about, write about, think about, experience, the past and the
future other than in the only place we are ever in, the
present? No. The notions we call the past and the future are
devices we use to organise the present, some. They are, as
Einstein wrote to Michele Besso, illusions. Convenient
illusions, perhaps. Pretending there is a past and a future
gives us places we can escape to when the present gets to be
too much.
If your present, in which you receive this, doesn't come after
my present, in which I'm sending this, please reverse the order
of past and future in the above. Ta!
-- Tim
PS: It's an astronomer's Fairy Tale which asks
Where have all the galaxies gone
Long time passing
Where have all the galaxies gone
Long time ago
PPS: You asked for "... 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." I don't know about "thinking better" but
what about The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951),
Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953), by
Isaac Asimov? What these stories tell us, I think, is that
all predictions are fictions though some of these fictions may
have corresponding truths, which we may discover in some
present we find ourselves in.
> On 10 Mar 2026, at 10:22, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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
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