Physicists who think carefully about time point to troubles posed by quantum mechanics, the laws describing the probabilistic behavior of particles. However, she said, “if somebody is called on to reflect a bit more deeply about what the block universe means, they start to question and waver on the implications.” “The majority of physicists believe in the block-universe view, because it is predicted by general relativity,” said Marina Cortês, a cosmologist at the University of Lisbon. The timeless, pre-determined view of reality held by Einstein remains popular today. “For us believing physicists,” Einstein wrote in 1955, weeks before his death, “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Einstein’s equations portray everything in the block universe as decided from the beginning the initial conditions of the cosmos determine what comes later, and surprises do not occur - they only seem to. In Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, time is woven together with the three dimensions of space, forming a bendy, four-dimensional space-time continuum - a “block universe” encompassing the entire past, present and future. Strangely, although we feel as if we sweep through time on the knife-edge between the fixed past and the open future, that edge - the present - appears nowhere in the existing laws of physics.
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