Where did the time go?

Across the evening sky

All the birds are leaving

But how can they know

It’s time for them to go?

Before the winter fire

I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?

Who knows where the time goes?

— Sandy Denny

With the passing of 2025 and the dawning of a new year here in the Age of Nefarious, it might be an apt time to consider the nature of time. Whether it’s real or illusory, I mean. The meanings of “now” and “then” … generally, what makes the whole muddle tick.

For time, depending on whom you ask and when you catch them (this clause is already problematic), is either the most obvious thing in the world or a sort of cosmic practical joke that everyone laughs at because not laughing would require sitting very still and thinking about it for a very long time. Which, historically, is how wrinkles get made.

Consider first the extremely relatable position of St. Augustine, who set down these thoughts more than 1,600 years ago:

What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I don't know. But at any rate this much I dare affirm I know: that if nothing passes, there would be no past time; if nothing were approaching, there would be no future time; if nothing were, there would be no present time.

But the two times, past and future, how can they be, since the past is no more and the future is not yet? On the other hand, if the present were always present and never flowed away into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. But if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past, how we can say that it is? For it is, only because it will cease to be. Thus we can affirm that time is only in that it tends towards not-being.

(Please hold while we transfer your call to our next available migraine. Your screams are being recorded for quality assurance.)

Augustine’s musings, circa 400 CE, are a comforting place to start because they underscore the fact that confusion about time is not a modern pathology caused by smartphones or daylight saving adjustments. Rather, the creeping awareness that there’s something deficient in our ordinary understanding of time is a foundational feature of consciousness itself.

Augustine’s point was that the past doesn’t exist anymore, the future doesn’t exist yet and the present — if you stare at it hard enough — shrinks to nothing. So where, exactly, is time? In your mind, apparently, which is not a reassuring answer unless you enjoy getting wound up like a cuckoo clock.

The influential Church Father was far from the first person to realize that the quotidian idea of time as simply the medium in which all events take place in succession is overly simplistic.

Among the ancient Greek philosophers who preceded Socrates, Parmenides was renowned for arguing that change and becoming are irrational illusions. Heraclitus, taking the opposite tack, maintained that whatever sense of permanence we have is the illusion and that change is the only thing that doesn’t change in a world in flux.

(Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul. I want to get lost in your rigamarole and drift away.)

Fast-forward (another expression sort of begging the question) to Isaac Newton, who decided to clean all this up by declaring time absolute, true and mathematical, flowing evenly without regard to anything else:

Absolute time, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external.

On this everyday view, which had been similarly propounded by Aristotle 300 years before Christ, time is like an invisible river, reliably sluicing moments past observers who may or may not be paying attention. This version of time is extremely useful for things like first dates, court summons and showing up to work, and even today most people stop asking rude questions and just go with the flow.

Newton’s great 17th-century German contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, however, who developed differential and integral calculus independently of the temperamental English genius’s breakthrough, concluded that there could be no time independent of events (aka one damn thing after another). For Leibniz, time is formed by events and relations among them, and simply constitutes the universal order of succession.

Then Albert Einstein arrived, rejected both Newton’s river and Leibniz’s universal order, and said something like this: Time actually depends where you’re standing and how fast you’re moving, which is the sort of call generally botched by the CFL Command Centre.

According to Einstein, time does not flow the same way for everyone. Two clocks can disagree and both be right, which is an unsettling concept unless you are a physicist or a philosopher, in which case it is Christmas morning.

Space and time get fused into spacetime, a four-dimensional block in which past, present and future all exist together. This leads to the so-called block universe, where time doesn’t pass so much as sit there, like a loaf of bread already sliced, and your life is one thin piece — whether or not you like marmalade. Einstein just smiled and gave us a Vegemite sandwich.

The late, great Stephen Hawking put it this way in his 1988 global bestseller A Brief History of Time, which sold more than 25 million copies in 40 languages and was understood by, oh, let’s be generous and guess 200 readers:

… the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time! It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.

In other words, as physicist Richard A. Muller demonstrated more clearly than Hawking in his 2016 book Now: The Physics of Time:

Not only does time stretch, flex, and flip, but such behaviour affects our daily lives. GPS, the satellite system that keeps us from getting lost, depends exquisitely on Einstein’s relativity equations, on these strange properties of time. …  The pace of time depends on local conditions of velocity and gravity, and even the order of events — which event came first — is not a universal truth.

Now at this point, a reasonable person might ask: If the future already exists, why do I still have to get out of bed? Physics has no answer for that. The equations work whether you feel free or trapped.

But you don’t need a PhD in quantum computing or even more than a basic understanding of general relativity to grasp the fact that our while common-sense notions of time and space, as Hawking wrote, work well when dealing with things like falling apples, or planets that skitter around the sun comparatively slowly, they don’t work at all for things moving at or near the speed of light:

The fact that light travels at a finite, but very high, speed was first discovered in 1676 by the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer. He observed that the times at which the moons of Jupiter appeared to pass behind Jupiter were not evenly spaced, as one would expect if the moons went around Jupiter at a constant rate. As the Earth and Jupiter orbit around the sun, the distance between them varies. Roemer noticed that eclipses of Jupiter’s moons appeared later the farther we were from Jupiter.

He argued that this was because the light from the moons took longer to reach us when we were farther away. His measurements of the variations in the distance of the Earth from Jupiter were, however, not very accurate, and so his value for the speed of light was 140,000 miles per second, compared to the modern value of 186,000 miles per second.

Roemer’s demonstration that light travels at a finite speed, achieved 11 years before Newton’s publication of Principia Mathematica, had profound implications for our understanding of time and the meaning of “now.”

Sunlight reflected off the moon takes 1.3 seconds to get to Earth, which means we see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds before. If the sun exploded seven minutes ago, we wouldn’t see the light from the explosion for another minute and 20 seconds. Not that we would have a lot of time to process this.

The most distant object you can see in the sky with your bare eyes is the Andromeda galaxy, as it was 2.5 million years ago. The most distant galaxy spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope is being viewed as it was 13.8 billion years ago, 300 million years after the Big Bang, nine billion years before our solar system began to coalesce. Telescopes are quite literally time machines.

So how “now,” brown cow? One more time with feeling: The pace of time depends on local conditions of velocity and gravity, and even the order of events — which event came first — is not a universal truth.

Some physicists, like Einstein’s math teacher Hermann Minkowski (who once called his young student a lazy dog), embraced this fully and declared that time itself was doomed to fade into a mere shadow of a deeper reality.

Others, like Julian Barbour, went further and suggested that time doesn’t exist at all, that the universe is a collection of “nows” arranged in a way that only looks like motion, the way a flipbook looks like a moving horse if you flip through it fast enough. In this view, you are not moving through time; you are a configuration of the universe that contains memories, which give you the strong and emotionally persuasive illusion of having come from somewhere.

(Which explains my old Bumble profile. Just swipe left and move on. Everybody else does.)

This is where entropy sneaks in, wearing a begrimed lab coat and a mischievous grin. The second law of thermodynamics says disorder always increases, which gives time a direction, an arrow pointing from neat to messy, from past to future, from eggs to omelettes.

Some scientists argue that it’s this arrow, not time itself, that we experience. We remember the past because the past had lower entropy, and we don’t remember the future because it hasn’t gotten messy yet. Time, on this account, is basically the universe’s way of keeping track of its own untidiness.

As ever (stacking the deck again), malcontented philosophers have been motivated to put in their own two cents. Idealist metaphysician J.M.E. McTaggart, now largely forgotten but a big deal a century ago, argued that time is unreal because our ways of describing it contradict each other. We talk about events as past, present and future, but those properties keep changing, which leads to logical problems that make your head hurt in a very pure, old-fashioned way. Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown.

French philosopher Henri Bergson insisted that lived time — duration, the felt flow of experience — is more real than the physicist’s clocks and coordinates. Try telling someone in love, or in pain, that time is just a dimension like space and watch how quickly the conversation ends. Or as Sylvia Plath once put it, love sets you going like a fat gold watch.

More recently, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has suggested that time might not be fundamental at all, emerging from deeper relations among physical systems. At the most basic level, the universe might be a network of interactions with no master clock ticking away. Time, like money or the concept of “late,” would then be a useful but ultimately approximate invention, something that works well enough for humans but does not appear in the fine print of reality.

Which brings us back to you, sitting there, aging in what feels like a very real way. What a drag it is getting old. What can a poor boy do ’cept to sing in a rock’n’roll band?

Even if time is an illusion, it is an illusion with consequences. You still miss buses. You still get older. You still feel that peculiar panic when you realize how long it’s been since you last thought carefully about what you’re doing with your life. The illusion, if that’s what it is, has teeth.

Is it, however, an illusion shared by all sentient creatures? By our fellow mammals, seemingly. But maybe there are alien species with an omniscient, godlike perspective for whom all moments, past, present and future, have always existed and always will.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. created such a race, the inhabitants of the imaginary planet Tralfamadore, in his sensational 1969 novel Slaughter-house Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.

Tralfamadorians, you might dimly recall through the blue smoke of half a century and the haze of perhaps another popular substance from that era, are free to examine all the moments of time the way people can look at a stretch of the Rockies:

They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.

I’m particularly partial to the way a zoo guide describes the limited human perspective to an oohing and aahing Tralfamadorian crowd that has come to behold captured novel protagonist Billy Pilgrim, a 44-year-old alumnus of the Ilium School of Optometry and a survivor, as was Vonnegut, of the joint British and American firebombing of Dresden in the closing months of the Second World War in Europe:

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.

This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.

The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped — went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.”

Billy’s life. Your life. Mine. Strapped to a flatcar of desire.

So is time an illusion? Possibly. Or maybe it’s a user interface, a simplified display that lets conscious but limited creatures like us navigate a staggeringly complex universe without immediately losing their minds.

To humans, the universe is like a movie. To Tralfamadorians, it’s a sculpture.

Tralfamadorians wouldn’t see the humour in that old saw about time being God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. For them it does, and they’re surely more in sync with modern physics than we are.

Tralfamadorians can see the whole arc of a novel at once; we are stuck forever mid-sentence, deciphering one letter at a time.

The block universe of Einstein and Minkowski, where all times coexist in a four-dimensional spacetime slab, is basically Tralfamadorian ontology with fewer zoo exhibits. Past, present and future are equally real, and the sensation of moving through them is a local phenomenon, like the way the needle of a record player gives the illusion that the song itself is travelling.

Tralfamadorians, we learn in the novel, have known wars and other horrors as terrible as anything on Earth. But the way they deal with traumatic events is worth a boo as 2025 is consigned to the history books.

As the guide tells Billy Pilgrim:

“There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments — like today at the zoo. Isn’t it a nice moment?”

“Yes.”

“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”

Who knows where the time goes? Maybe it doesn’t. Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Only the bad stuff.

Here’s to a less trumpmatic 2026. Same as it ever was.

And ever will be.

So it goes.

And stays.