“Is Time a Figment of our Imaginations?”
— asked the title of an article by Jo Marchant featured in The Guardian (Sun 22 Mar 2026), which was then filled with the usual pastiche of sophistical arguments drawn from various contexts, for instance:
Because even cosmologists, measuring the universe, don’t find any moving river of time: most believe there’s no physical flow of events beyond our perception, no moment of “happening” or “becoming” in which the future slips into the past.
For me, having written a whole book patiently debunking similar claims about the unreality of becoming, it is dispiriting, to say the least, to see them endlessly repeated. It’s not that these claims aren’t made by reputable physicists and philosophers of science, they certainly are, as Jo Marchant reports. But it is an interesting phenomenon that people want it to be true that there is no objective becoming, and that this is a mere figment of our imaginations. And generally, but especially these days, what people want to be true trumps (I use the word advisedly!) any arguments to the contrary. (There are millions of YouTube channels, AI-generated, that plausibly tell you exactly what you want to hear based on your preferences, faithfully tracked by algorithms.) This raises the question, why do people want to believe that events do not objectively come out of preceding events, and that this is “all in our minds”? Before I get into that, though, I should explain why I call these arguments sophistical.
First there is the very easy argument that the flow of time cannot consist in a moving now (“the moving river of time”), because this would require another time with respect to which its rate of flow could be measured. But time is not a thing that can flow, or in fact do anything at all. That is to hypostatise time, to treat it as something concrete. What it is, rather, is the order in which all possible events succeed one another, with some intrinsic beat or measure of the rate of succession. When I measure my pulse it is with respect to this intrinsic beat. Marchant points out that we are often mistaken in our perceptions, and gives the example of the distortions of time perception that are introduced, for instance, by someone on the psychedelic drug mescalin. But there she is straying into Carlos Castañeda territory, where the world is equated with the drug-induced dream world: using mescalin may well slow down or speed up your perceptions of time lapse, but it will not alter the reality of how fast your heart is actually beating.
But what about our feelings of time’s flow, the “whoosh” so beloved of analytic metaphysicians? In a review of an article of mine, Adrian Heathcote wrote the following. I think he intended it as a criticism, but in fact it expressed my own view perhaps with more clarity than I had managed:
the feeling that time is flowing is not due to a movement of time but rather [to the fact] that there is something that is changing that we are imagining as unchanging: this is the Self, or the I, or the ego. We falsely imagine this Self as a static element with change in the things about us and us observing that change. We imagine something as flowing relative to [us] who are static, but in reality we are changing in just the same way as the world is changing. The illusion of something flowing is caused by the illusion that something that is flowing isn’t.
So the idea of ourselves as being in a present is part of the same illusion: the present becomes the moment we have trapped the Self in.
Events succeed other events relentlessly, whatever our subjective experiences might be. This is the “march of time” against which we would rebel. But it is not this passage of events one into the next that is a construct of the mind, it is the Self itself, which is constantly being reconstructed in the wake of new experiences and memories of the past, and yet imagined as somehow static, outside of time.
Marchant promotes “lived time”, in opposition to the “clock time” beloved of physicists: “Instead of something we chase and never catch, it’s a flow that carries us and connects us with each other. And rather than being imposed from the outside, lived time comes from within.” (Although she does not tell the reader, this is pure Bergson.) “Clock time” is a handy pot into which to put all that abstruse stuff about relativity and quantum physics that no one seems to understand, whereas being late for an appointment is all too real.
So, second, what are these arguments from physics that show that time is “not a physical phenomenon at all”, but only “a mathematical tool or book-keeping device – useful for coordinating our interactions, but with no independent existence of its own”, as Marchant alleges? Note that this is to treat time as if it is a concrete phenomenon, existing independently of things, and then to shoot this false conception down. What Marchant is alluding to here is the time that does the co-ordinating of distant events. According to relativity theory, this co-ordinate time is relative to the reference frame chosen. Physicists, unwittingly influenced by subjectivist philosophy, talk of co-ordinate time being “relative to the observer”. But a reference frame is not chosen relative to some enduring subject, it is adopted as convenient to represent what is going on as simply as possible, and all assignations of the dates of distant events according to different frames are inter-translatable. So co-ordinate time may be relative to frame, but it is no less objective for that.
The time elapsed for a given process, on the other hand, is calculated along the path through spacetime that the process takes, and this time, “proper time” in the trade, is invariant, the same whatever reference frame is used to calculate it. Thus in the famous example devised by Langevin to illustrate this point (the so-called “twin paradox”), the twin who travels on a long journey in space at near light speed will, on reconvening with the twin at home, turn out to be younger than the stay-at-home twin. This discrepancy in the proper times of the twins’ journeys (the “time dilation” of the travelling twin) is a paradox in the root sense of the word: it is contrary to opinion or expectation. Nevertheless, it is a predicted and verified feature of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, where longer spatial paths between the same two points of spacetime correspond to shorter proper times between them.
Moreover, if one event in a material process is to come out of another, it must be connected to it by a process going at less than the speed of light. But any two points in spacetime that are so connected have a temporal order that is also invariant. So, according to relativity theory, there is no subjectivity about the order in which events come about, despite the relativity of which distant events are judged simultaneous with which.
As for Quantum Theory, one of the most surprising consequences of this theory, again predicted and thoroughly confirmed, is that the energy of any system is precisely associated with a given frequency ν. Combining this with the mass-energy equivalence established by Einstein, yields the result that the mass of any system is correlated with its own frequency, its own beat. Combining the E = mc^2^ of relativity with the E = hν of Quantum Theory, where c is the speed of light in a vacuum and h is Planck’s constant, we get that mc^2^ = hν. In particular, the rest mass of an elementary particle, m0, is invariant, like proper time, so it is associated with a distinct frequency ν0 = (c^2^/h) m0. The associated invariant frequencies of masses in the universe are the basis of atomic clocks: they keep perfect time. So the beat of the universe, if you like, is written into the most fundamental relations at the heart of relativity and quantum theory. Again, there is nothing imaginary about it.
Still, as I said earlier, many people want to believe that there is no objective becoming in the universe. I won’t go into the other specific reasons physicists and philosophers give for denying it, the arguments for a block universe, and those from the time symmetry of fundamental equations, entropy, quantum gravity, time loops, and so forth; if you are interested I have treated them in detail in my book, The Reality of Time Flow. But what is the general attraction in wanting to believe that time is unreal? That is a socio-psychological question requiring some serious study, and it may not have a unique answer. But having raised it, I’ll indulge in a little speculation.
One reason people give is the fear that the march of time, or the deterministic equations of physics, deprives them of free will. But this is a complete misconception based on a false idea of a free will as being one that has no determining factors. If your freedom of choice is being compromised, it is not by equations governing physical processes in your brain, but by algorithms on YouTube that predict your preferences on the basis of your past behaviour. These were your choices, and so is the decision you may make to go along with what the algorithm suggests. It is the same with everything else that is predictable about human social behaviour. Your present choice is determined by your past choices, and these depend on your upbringing and life experiences – in other words, on you. So, if what you decide to do is determined, it is determined by you. To blame determination on time, or fate, or on the equations of physics, is a complete cop-out.
But I think there is a deeper reason for wanting to imagine away time that is connected to a fundamental feature of human nature. This is our ability to imagine the future, coupled with a consciousness of self which depicts us in a kind of frozen now, as described by Heathcote. We not only remember and reconstruct past events in our minds, but plan future ones, and our superior ability to do this has no doubt given humans an evolutionary advantage. But this ability to picture events in the future as well as in the past suggests a symmetry of past and future, and seduces us into thinking of all events, past and future, as being “already there” – hence the “block universe”. But they are only “there” in our imaginations. And the power of our imaginations enables us to conceive the frozen now in which we picture events as the true reality, and the becoming of these events as an illusion.