Page 772 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

A person's past is composed
of information given to her
memory. If a person's memory
is erased, her past is also
erased. The future is com-
posed of ideas. Without these
ideas, only the "present mo-
ment" of experience remains.

"I still have trouble accepting it" he (Barbour) says. But then, common sense has never been a reliable guide to
understanding the universe – physicists have been confounding our perceptions since Copernicus first sug-
gested that the sun does not revolve around Earth. After all, we don't feel the slightest movement as the spin-
ning Earth hurtles through the void at some 67,000 miles per hour. Our sense of the passage of time, Barbour

argues, is just as wrongheaded as the credo of the Flat Earth Society. 41

As we can see above, this renowned physicist pointed out that any idea we have of time being absolute
is false, and that research done in modern physics has confirmed this. Time is not absolute; it is a variously
perceived, subjective concept depending on events.
François Jacob, thinker, Nobel laureate and famous professor of genetics, in his book entitled Le Jeu des

Possibles (The Possible and the Actual) says this about the possibility that time can move backwards:

Films played backwards make it possible for us to imagine a world in which time flows backwards. A world in
which milk separates itself from the coffee and jumps out of the cup to reach the milk-pan; a world in which
light rays are emitted from the walls to be collected in a trap (gravity center) instead of gushing out from a light
source; a world in which a stone slopes to the palm of a man by the astonishing cooperation of innumerable

drops of water which enable the stone to jump out of water. Yet, in such a world in which time has such opposite
features, the processes of our brain and the way our memory compiles information, would similarly be func-
tioning backwards. The same is true for the past and future and the world will appear to us exactly as it cur-
rently appears. 42

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