The surreal painting
“The Persistence of Memory” by the renowned artist Salvador Dali is a splendid illustration of a deep mystery -the concept we call time. This marvelous painting exhibits ants devouring a clock and time melting into oblivion. Philosophers like Plato who contemplated time as immortal and Newton who elevated time to an eternal level might not accept the death of time. However, the last century witnessed the descent of time from immortal to mortal level. Now, the descendants of Einstein trying to annihilate time which had been wounded in the revolution unleashed by theory of relativity.
In classical Physics, time is a river flowing simply in the forward direction. The observer or external forces like gravity have no impact on the flow of time.
Julian Barbour’s “The end of time” is an enormous attempt to understand the time -for few people have authentically thought about the real nature of time and what it truly is. Time has no role in his picture of the cosmos. Recently, physicists like Carlo Rovelli working on quantum gravity could describe the dynamics of events without reference to time? An intriguing achievement! They believe time doesn't exist at all and this illusion is formed due to the motion of the objects. As a matter of fact, all the Laws of Physics are time symmetric which means the concept of time does not distinguish the events in the past present or future.
Is time an illusion? It’s inconceivable to envision that idea as time is trailing us like a shadow with its invisible presence. Time is the most familiar experience we deal with yet we don’t know much about that. In fact, mythology sought the answer for such a subject much before the advent of science. For instance, in “Vishnu Purana” Narada asks Vishnu about the meaning of time for which Vishnu replies that it is a delusion generated as a consequence of our interaction with the physical world.
In Astrophysics, theoretical computations show that the expansion of the universe at an accelerated rate is also the result of our false notion of time. Some physicists argue the veil of illusion attributable to time must be removed to know the absolute truth. They anticipate the subsequent revolution in Physics would be a cosmos depicted without the constraint of time. But, what if the universe itself an illusion followed by life? This is nothing new in philosophy or religion; however, science has a unique process to seek the truth founded on reason and evidences. Maybe the scientific revolutions will linger until reality and illusion are indistinguishable.
