For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the notion that time itself might be an illusion.
For Albert Einstein’s 70th birthday, his friend and walking companion Kurt Gödel gave the physicist an unusual gift: an exacting mathematical proof, rooted in Einstein’s own theory of relativity, that time could not exist (Gödel’s wife had knitted Einstein a birthday sweater, but decided not to give it). Gödel’s offering was a 20th-century variant of a metaphysical conclusion that certain philosophers have reached before: one of the most intuitively obvious aspects of our lived experience, time itself, might be a logical impossibility.
The ancient Greeks had their versions of that argument, as did a host of great Buddhist philosophers including Nāgārjuna, writing in third-century India, the 13th-century Zen poet Dōgen, and the 14th-century Tibetan scholar-yogi Longchenpa. In Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant touched on the issue, and in 1908 J.M.E. McTaggart laid his cards on the table with The Unreality of Time. Since then, numerous philosophers, logicians and physicists (including Julien Barbour, who wrote The End of Time and Carlo Rovelli, who has found Nāgārjuna’s philosophy helpful for his own timeless grappling with quantum gravity).