Time: Feynman vs Einstein

Have you ever been stuck in a waiting room staring at the clock, swearing that the second hand is just being lazy? Well, that sensation—that time is “passing”—might be the biggest fake news your brain has ever told you.

So, I found myself at a random point in life watching a video about Feynman’s view on time, intertwined with Einstein’s relativity, and I walked away with a strange feeling: that I’ve spent my entire life believing in a bad metaphor:

The one about the flowing river, the past dying behind, and the future that doesn’t exist yet. Beautiful, poetic, great for a song lyric.

Apparently false.

Feynman and the Laws of Physics That Don’t Know Time

Here’s the first punch in the gut: no fundamental law of physics distinguishes between the past and the future. None. If you film two particles colliding and play the video in reverse, the equations still hold. Physics doesn’t have a preference; the only one with that preference is you, trying to understand why you can never “unbreak” a cup.

And here comes entropy, the villain (or heroine, depending on the day’s mood or how crazy your dog is) of this article. Entropy is, roughly speaking, the measure of disorder in a system. And it only increases. The universe started organized (or “low entropy”, to use the jargon) and is inexorably headed towards total chaos.

Your feeling of “time passing” is basically like surfing on a wave of increasing entropy. The cup breaks and doesn’t reassemble itself because there are trillions of ways for it to be in pieces and only one way for it to be whole. The “arrow of time” isn’t a law of physics; it’s pure statistics: the universe doing what probability dictates.

Depressing? Maybe. But also somewhat liberating: you’re not “losing time”. You are literally riding the cosmos’ entropy. Put that on your LinkedIn.

Einstein and the Frozen Block

Now for the second punch, and this one hurts more. According to Einstein’s relativity, time isn’t a stage where things happen - it’s geometry. A dimension, along with the three of space, forms what physicists call spacetime.

In this view, your entire life - your birth, that bad report card from elementary school, this ridiculous text you’re reading now, your last day (sorry, but it exists) - is already there. Everything coexists in a permanent structure, like a block of ice with everything frozen inside. Past, present, and future don’t come one after the other: they simply are, simultaneously, somewhere in the geometry.

I mean, “at the same time” isn’t even the right expression because it implies a universal “now” - and it’s exactly this “now” that physics proceeds to dismantle next.

The “Now” Is a Lie Your Brain Tells You

There isn’t a present moment shared across the entire universe. Each observer has their own valid timeline, and your cell phone’s GPS proves that every single day: the satellites, being faster and farther from Earth’s mass, feel time passing at a slightly different pace than you do. If no one corrected that difference, the GPS would accumulate an error of several kilometers per day - and you’d show up at the wrong address with admirable conviction.

In other words, the “now” you feel so fiercely is a biological construct, a shortcut your brain created to help you, I don’t know, escape a predator or remember to pay the bill. Useful? Extremely. True in the physical sense? Not even close.

So Why Do I Feel Time Passing?

Because you’re made of memory and increasing entropy, that’s the honest, boring answer. Your brain only records events in one direction (that of increasing entropy), so you “remember” the past and not the future - and you call that flow. It’s a side effect of how you process information, not a property of the universe.

Accepting this doesn’t change much in practice - you’ll still be late for meetings and still feel like Sunday night lasts five minutes and Monday morning lasts a month. But it changes something deep down: maybe the anxiety of “time is passing and I didn’t do anything” is less about time and more about the narrative you tell yourself on top of a thermodynamic mess nobody asked you to organize alone.

A High Five to Physics Nobody Asked For

No one lives life thinking about frozen blocks of spacetime - and thank goodness for that, because it would make for one weird birthday party. But every once in a while, it’s worth remembering that the most obvious and everyday feeling you have - that time slips through your fingers - is, in the strictest view science has managed to produce so far, a useful illusion.

It’s somewhat funny: we spend our lives chasing time, and it’s not even going anywhere.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bill overdue by three days in a dimension that insists on being quite linear for me)