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Tallis in Wonderland

Thinking Straight About Curved Space

Raymond Tallis rules out a distorting physics metaphor.

In earlier columns, I have defended time from the assaults of physics. With a few exceptions, physicists have not been kind to time. Relativity theory stripped it of its tenses, dismissing the difference between past, present, and future as illusory. Worse, the theory seemed to deny time an independent existence. As Herman Minkowski put it, “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union will preserve an independent reality” (The Principle of Relativity, 1952).

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