Special Relativity On Past, Present And Future — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [1]

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 76):

This unified four-dimensional spacetime description has proved highly successful in explaining many physical phenomena, and is now the accepted view of the physical world. Powerful though it is, it has removed from the picture any vestige of a personal 'now', or the division of time into past, present and future. 

Einstein once expressed this point in a letter to a friend regarding the subject of death. 'To us who are committed physicists,' he wrote, 'the past, present and future are only illusions, however persistent.'

The reason for this is that, according to relativity theory, time does not 'happen' bit by bit, moment by moment: it is stretched out, like space, in its entirety. Time is simply there.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, four-dimensional space-time does not conflict with the division of time into past, present and future, because the latter is concerned with construed temporal locations and extents relative to the 'now' of meaning-making: saying or sensing.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, time does not 'happen bit by bit, moment by moment', processes 'happen bit by bit, moment by moment', and time is 'stretched out' and 'simply there' in the sense that it is the dimension along which processes unfold. The confusion of time with process pervades the discourse of physics.