Physical reality (photon arrivals, local expansion, quantum events) changes continuously, so the moment you finish a sentence the universe is not exactly the same as when you began it. The gap between physical change and conscious perception means the human 'present' is a useful illusion, not a fundamental slice of time.
— This framing sharpens public understanding of time, evidence, and urgency: policy claims and eyewitness testimony rest on a constructed present, so communicators should be careful about asserting absolute simultaneity or permanence.
Sean Carroll
2026.05.12
75% relevant
Carroll’s claim that past, present and future exist simultaneously is a statement of eternalism or the 'block universe' view — the same move captured by the existing idea that each 'now' is just a different slice of a single physical manifold; the article popularizes that physics framing and connects it explicitly to entropy as the source of apparent time direction.
Ethan Siegel
2026.03.31
100% relevant
Ethan Siegel's Big Think article point that the universe changes noticeably even across the time it takes to read a sentence (light‑travel delays and expansion) exemplifies the idea.
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