Einstein's initial reaction to Minkowski's view of spacetime and the associated with it four dimensional physics (also introduced by Minkowski) was not quite favorable: "Since the mathematicians have invaded the relativity theory, I do not understand it myself any more. However, later Einstein adopted [...] Minkowski's spacetime physics (which was crucial for Einstein's revolutionary theory of gravity as curvature of spacetime)... --Space and Time Minkowski’s Papers on Relativity
I posted before the formulas of Einstein stated
temporally instead of
time.
Your inputs are very welcome and it's time to reveal more about Einstein's ideas about
time when is about mathematics and when is about physical reality.
Neither Einstein or Minkowski were scientists doing experimental work but mathematicians. Einstein tried once to do experimental work but his attempts failed and he quited.
For Minkowsky, Einstein said, "time passed from a happening into an existence" which will cause a fourth dimensional world. Here is where Minkowski was wrong.
Then, Einstein explained that it happens that for him, in the world of mathematics, the word
dimension acquires a different meaning. He expanded himself saying that in mathematics calling
time a
fourth dimension simply means a
fourth variable which is inserted into a equation which will cover events, because events ocurr not only inside the three dimensional world but also in an instant in
time.
For Einstein a fourth dimension of time in mathematics was just a variable inserted in his formulas representing an instant in
time. For this reason his interpretation of this instant was called by him
t =
temporally.
Eventually, under the influence of Minkowski and by inertia of stupidity, Einstein himself also ended adopting the idea of a phyisical fourth dimensional space-time continuum in his theories.
He never understood his own theory. For example, when he was asked what is
time, he responded:
time is what clocks measure.
His position was far away from describing physical reality, and in his own world of abstract mathematics, the bodies acted in a perfect path and behavior. His ideas of constant speed of light, a top speed of light, light never expiring if no resistance is on its way, and similar ideas, those fit perfectly in his theories but no so in the real physical universe.
Again, before the developments of "Mink" and GR. Whether ultimately correct or not, they had their own origin for the supposed "flow" back then.
The rough idea of a "block-universe" was hardly new; mathematicians of the late 19th-century first introduced the conception of time fitting a 4D profile. With H.G. Wells reading their material and outputting "The Time Machine" in 1895. At the very first of that tale, his "traveler" explains that it is not time that flows, but consciousness -- or cognition via its discrimination into a sequence of incremental, distinct states and experiences. (Wells appropriated that from the applicable experts of the era, too).
Sure, if such was what The Time Machine was about, then hypnosis rather than a machine shoukld be the vedette in that novel.
The brain becomes a dimensionally extended worm-like form in a block-universe paradigm, with each of its differing, but co-existing neural states regarding itself as a solipistic island of "now". Each narrowly treats only its own experience as real, not the others. But the sequential development of shared memory subsumes them under an overarching identity that -- combined with that order and "logic" of cognition -- yields the cinematic illusion of something flowing.
Your example does not imply a feeling of flowing of
time but a linear sequence of memories. What it causes the illusion of flowing
time is just percepotion of motion compared to a clock or any regular motion. You don't need a clock but perceiving the Sun disappearing at the horizon in a bored day with no much to do, and you will feel
time passed slow. It is a bunch of inserted concepts or ideas in your mind combined with events around you.
Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [4D worm] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
In simply words, only the objective things in the present exists. I discovered a law
about this issue. It is food for another topic in another opportunity.
