Time – The Biggest Illusion Of All

There is a temporal mentality ingrained in the mainstream of physics and society about “Time”, according to which time has a physical existence. Although it has a lot of definitions, some uncontroversial ones as mentioned on Wikipedia are that “Time is what a clock measures” or “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once”.

Usually, there are two distinctive ideas about time. One being that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe – a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. This is referred to as Newtonian Time. However, Einstein did not believe in time, he believed in timelessness and emphasized over the idea that time is basically a human construct, a perception of the human mind which it uses to catalogue experiences and certain events, to quantize life into certain happenings. He did not approve of the concept of “NOW”.

In his ‘Book of Relativity’, Einstein stated that, “For us physicists, the separation between past, present and future is only an illusion although a convincing one.” He also exclaimed that, ”The experiences of an individual appear to us arranged in a series of events, in this series the single events which we remember appear to be ordered according to the criterion of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’. There exists therefore an ‘I-Time’ or ‘subjective time’. This in itself is not measurable.”

The conclusion we reach here is that time has no absolute existence, the clock doesn’t measure time it’s actually the order of events by which time is measured. The information we have on the rate of passage of time is based on relative references. Likewise, another physicist, Richard Feynman describes time as merely a direction in space in his book ‘Sum over Histories’. It is said that we can never know how time flows or even if it flows or not. Sense of time like sense of color is a form of perception.

Furthermore, Lincoln Barnett stated, “Just as there is no such thing as color without an eye to discern it, so an instant or an hour or a day is nothing without an event to mark it.”

In The Holy Quran it is indicated that people perceive time differently and that sometimes people can perceive a very short period of time as a very lengthy one. It is generally questioned that how Allah already knows of the events that have not yet happened, the answer to this is that those events have not yet happened for us only. Allah however knows it for a fact as he is not bound. In Surratt al-Mumenoon it is stated, “He will say: ‘What number of years did ye stay on earth?’ They will say: ‘We stayed a day or part of a day: but ask those who keep account.’ He will say: ‘Ye stayed not but a little, – if ye had only known!’” It clarifies how all is already told in Quran about the start, the happenings in between and the end of the world. Occurrences that are going to take place after our death (from our point of view) are mentioned as already experienced and past events in the Qur’an. Allah is not bound by the relative time frame that we are confined in. As Barnett said, “The universe can be encompassed in its entire majesty only by a cosmic intellect.” – That cosmic intellect being the Almighty.

This all points to the fact that time indeed is not an universal fact but rather a relative perception.