Does Time Exist? (Or, how Aristotle got metaphor wrong)
I remember some time ago hearing the physicist Sean Carroll, who's written quite a bit on the subject of time, mention that he and a colleague of his, fellow physicist Julian Barbor, disagreed strongly on the existence of time. Being physicists, they're debating the subject purely from the perspective of whether time can or should be disregarded from equations. But what about the broader idea that time doesn't really exist? Obviously, it seems prima facie absurd. Time is an absolutely central and fundamental part of the human experience. It's integral to virtually every scientific field, and has been a topic of philosophical musings for millennia. How can time not exist? But wait a second... couldn't the same have been said of color? Color is a deeply seated part of our phenomenological experience, but cognitive neuroscience has shown that color does not exist "out there", so to speak — that is, it is not a property that inheres in the world, but is a