Page 81 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

Relativity of Time and The Reality of Destiny 79

physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. Lincoln Barnett, writes in his
book The Universe and Dr. Einstein:
Along with absolute space, Einstein discarded the concept of absolute time
— of a steady, unvarying inexorable universal time flow, streaming from the
infinite past to the infinite future. Much of the obscurity that has surrounded
the Theory of Relativity stems from man's reluctance to recognize that a
sense of time, like sense of colour, is a form of perception. Just as space is
simply a possible order of material objects, so time is simply a possible
order of events. The subjectivity of time is best explained in Einstein's own
words. "The experiences of an individual," he says, "appear to us arranged in
a series of events; in this series the single events which we remember
appear to be ordered according to the criterion of 'earlier" and 'later'. There
exists, therefore, for the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in
itself is not measurable. I can, indeed, associate numbers with the events, in
such a way that a greater number is associated with the later event than with
an earlier one." 58

Einstein himself pointed out, as quoted from Barnett's book, that
"space and time are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from

The past is composed of
information given to a per-
son's memory. If a memory
is erased, her past is also.
The future is composed of
ideas. Without them, only
the present moment of
experience remains.