Bud Rapanault 26 August 2023

This statement is clearly false:

"There is no “objective now” in the sense of some moment of time that all tokens of “now” refer to. But so what? Nobody ever thought differently."

As your article points out Newton believed there was a universal "now" and so too does every cosmologist who is allowed to draw a paycheck, all of whom are happy to inform you that "the Universe is 13.8 billion years old", an assertion of a universal simultaneity. That such a belief stands in direct contradiction to Relativity Theory (on which the standard model allegedly rests) is just one of the many absurdities attendant on the Big Bang fairy tale.

As to this:

"Temporal structure is fundamentally different from spatial structure."

Neither space, time, nor spacetime are observed phenomena. They are not physical things. There is no evidence supporting the widespread belief that they are physical things rather than merely relational concepts. Space and time do not have structure any more than "distance" has structure. Time is not an illusion but the belief that it is a causally interacting entity that makes physical processes "flow" is delusional.

Xinhang Shen 3 December 2022

Time is what a clock tells. Nobody in the world has problems in using clocks and arranges their activities according to time, regardless what philosophers and physicists say as they take time as a kind of playdough that can be stretched and pressed according their willing. In order to facilitate his postulate that the speed of light is constant relative to all inertial reference frames, Einstein redefined time with Lorentz Transformation, while time has already been defined by clocks and there is no freedom to redefine it. Thus, the only consequence is that the time defined by Lorenz Transformation is not the time defined by clocks. Actually we can easily see their difference: according to Lorentz Transformation, the relativistic time of the inertial reference frame moving relative to the observer becomes shorter than the relativistic time of the inertial reference frame of the observer, the period of the moving clock as an interval of the relativistic time of the moving frame becomes shorter too, which makes the frequency of the moving clock as the reciprocal of the period becomes faster rather than slower. Thinking the moving clock will tick more slowly than the stationary clock is totally wrong. Therefore, the relativistic time of the moving frame is not the clock time of the moving clock, but a new variable without physical meaning. Based on such a fake time, special relativity is wrong and so are all relativistic spacetime based physics theories are wrong.

Matthew Huddleston 30 November 2022

As a fan of Maudlin's previous writing, I am amazed at the number of misunderstandings he displays here, in physics, history, and philosophy. As a physicist, I'll stick to identifying two glaring errors in that realm.

First he writes, "There is no 'objective now' in the sense of some moment of time that all tokens of 'now' refer to. But so what? Nobody ever thought differently."

Lots of people have thought differently! Lee Smolin, for example, has spent the last few decades trying to convince other physicists that "now" has a unique quality to it that may unlock future discoveries into a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics.

Secondly, Maudlin uses circular reasoning to equate sequence with flow. He asserts that time is different than space because it has direction, and thus, flow. But, as innumerable physicists have written, although there is a difference between past and future, the *direction* of that difference does not appear in physics. The only reason we think of a sequence of events as flowing towards the future and not towards the past is because we have a sense of time flowing.

We could easily imagine a preferred direction to a spatial dimension that would allow things along that dimension to be placed in an ordered sequence. That would in no way imply that space "flowed" in any particular direction.

Please, Dr. Maudlin, read up on the numerous people who have written on this subject (including your history of Einstein and philosophers who have defended true presentism) before publishing articles on this topic.

Gabriel Vacariu 1 30 November 2022

Einstein's relativity presupposes "time" (spacetime), but his personal belief was "time" did not have an ontological status...