Dear Diary,
My mentee and I have the absolute Best-est conversations. We discuss everything from the perils of "pre-approved credit cards" and "ghostmen" and "time space continuums."
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The Present or `Now':
*Relativity's view of time as one part of a 4D continuum requires the notion of times passage to be an illusion:
The physical view of time is one where a 4D spacetime continuum exists as one entity. Thus, our everyday notion that time passes or is in flux is an illusion. While this is difficult to understand, or accept, there are numerous examples where our conscious perceptions differ from physical reality. For example, perception of color differs slightly from individual to individual, however, the physical interpretation of color is simply the wavelength of light emitted or reflected by an object.
*Our inability to perceive all of spacetime is signified by the boundary of time marked by the 'now':
Of course the key moment in our conscious perception of time is the present or now. The present marks the boundary being the past, which we have memory of, and the future which we have little or no knowledge. In a spacetime diagram, the present is indicated by a line horizontal to the spatial axis. As time passes or flows, we represent this by moving the present line upward at a rate of one sec per sec. For human minds, the present line is not perfectly thin. Our perception of time is fuzzy at about the 1/16 of a sec interval. For this reason, single images can be strung together at speeds greater than 1/16 sec to create the illusion of motion and time in videos.
*Memory allows us access to the past, but knowledge of the future is very limited:
Its not uncommon for our common sense view of the Universe to differ from the more exacting view presented by physics. The psychologically manifestation of physical events is what makes up our perception of the world around us. Take, for example, the old riddle of when a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to hear it, does it make a sound? A physics response to this riddle is that the falling tree does indeed make a wave of compression of air. But it takes a psychological view to explain that the compression of air on a human ear produces the perception of sound in the brain.
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec18.html
