The calendar on the wall says time marches forward along a single line. The Sabbath says it returns, fresh every seven days. And physics, strangely, hints that maybe it doesn’t really move. Three pictures of the same thing, and that is exactly the work we do here: set them side by side, without forcing a choice.
In the issue on the “now” we saw that physics describes time with no present tense. Here we add a layer.
What science says
Physics has one agreed-upon “arrow of time”: entropy, the measure of disorder, tends to grow, which is how we can tell past from future. (science) But beyond that, some physicists hold that all of time is laid out like an axis that already exists, with no real “flow.” This view is contested. (contested science, and philosophy) In short: a line with a direction, but maybe with no motion.
What tradition offers
Many traditions did not imagine time as a line, but as a returning circle: festivals that come back, seasons, a day that renews. In the Jewish idiom, the Sabbath returns each week and “renews the work of creation”; other religious calendars, Christian and Muslim, are also built on a cycle of sacred time. Not a physical claim, but an entirely different sense of what time does: not only continuing, but coming back.
Why it touches you
A line, a circle, or a still block that does not move. It is striking that each picture is true for part of experience: there is a direction in life that cannot be reversed, there are cycles that recur, and there are moments that feel outside time altogether.
So a question: which of the pictures is truer to your life — the line that moves forward, the circle that comes back, or the block in which everything already exists?