There is a complex interplay between our intuitive understanding of time's transient nature and its representation in modern physics as a dimension. We need to challenge the mainstream view of time as an illusion, and instead seek something that integrates the concept of Becoming into the very fabric of reality, writes Avshalom Elitzur.
It is perhaps the most fundamental ingredient of our experience that reality is constantly changing: Every moment, in its turn, seems to bring new events that did not exist before and that will vanish later. Every event, therefore, has three temporal properties that come one after another: i) before the event takes place it is a potential future event, subject in principle to interference; then, ii) when it actually happens, it is a fleeting present, and finally, iii) after its occurrence, it is a given, unchangeable past. In everyday language, there is a temporal property –– the Now – that continuously moves from one moment to the next, from every event to the following one. Conversely, we may view time itself as passing relative to us, its passage being experienced as the change of the future into present and then into past. Reality, then, seems to be subject to an incessant Becoming.
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