Special Relativity On Past, Present And Future — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [3]

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 77):

In one reference frame events B and A are simultaneous: event B occurs at 'the same moment' as event A. In another frame, it is [a later] event B' that is simultaneous with A.

If A is somebody's 'now', which event, B or B' can uniquely be described as happening 'now'? The answer is neither. There is a whole range of 'present moments' including B and B', and any definition of 'now' is entirely relative.

By changing one's state of motion, the choice of simultaneous events can be altered, perhaps by hundreds of years! Any attempt to argue that only 'present moments' are real therefore seem doomed: time must be stretched out, like space, so that past, present and future exist with equal status. 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, 'now' is the time of construing experience as meaning. If event A is somebody's 'now', and if event B' is later than event B, then event B happened in the observer's past, and event B' happened later in the observer's past (or in the observer's present). In this view, therefore, it is an error to claim that there is a whole range of 'present moments' including B and B'. Moreover, it is not the definition of 'now' that is relative, but the 'now' itself.

By changing one's state of motion, what is altered is the time interval between the time of observing and the time of the observed event. 'Present moments' are thus "real", but in the sense that they are the times of construing experience as meaning, as in the act of observing. Time is 'stretched out", but in the sense that it extends as a dimension: the dimension along which processes unfold. 

By the same token, past, present and future do not "exist" with equal status, since events in the past have happened (past in present), events in the present are happening (present in present), and events in the future are going to happen (future in present).