Looking into the night sky, we see the stars how they were millions or billions of years ago, as they are so far away the light has only just reached us. That means we actually see the Sun how it was 8 minutes ago. The Sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth (that's about 150 thousand million metres) meaning that even though light travels at just under 300 million metres per second through space it still takes light from the Sun just over 8 minutes to reach us. This idea comes from the fact that light does not travel instantaneously but takes time to reach us. What we perceive as happening in the present is actually composed of things that have happened in the past. There is no instantaneous moment but rather a seemless blurring of the past into the future. This means the notion of ‘now' is one of the biggest misconceptions of time. Travelling through time is no different to travelling through space. Similarly, future events already exist and you're travelling through time to when they occur. Your destination already exists and you are simply travelling through space to it. As you travel away from your home, it still exists in space, and similarly past events still exist in time.

Think of this as like your journey from home to your school or to your work. In this world, rather than the flow of time, mathematics and logic rule. The past, the present, and the future all exist simultaneously and forever. But if time is simply a dimension like those of space, as Einstein theorised, then we can come up with a counter-intuitive idea: that time and all events have always existed and always will.

We often dwell on the past, on times gone by, and like to think our futures are not already set. The past has happened and no longer exists. Our intuition about time is that we live in the present. Moving through the time dimension is what gives us the feeling of time passing, similar to how we sense motion as we traverse through space.

Realgrain watches