Does time pass? | Julian Barbour, Tim Maudlin, Emily Thomas

Are we deluded by experience into imagining the present is real? Watch the full debate at Past and future are worlds we can never inhabit. We live of necessity in the present. But physicists and philosophers with very different outlooks, from Einstein to Derrida, claim that the present is an illusion. Is time not a river at all, but instead a static dimension? Are we deluded by experience into imagining the present is real? Or are Einstein’s spacetime universe, and Derrida’s attack on the metaphysics of presence, fundamental errors? Julian Barbour is a physicist with research interests in quantum gravity and the history of science. Tim William Eric Maudlin is a philosopher of science, whose influential work focuses on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic. Emily Thomas is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. S