It is with that, and the block Universe, in mind that we can understand why, when his old friend Michele Besso died in 1955, Einstein wrote in a letter of condolences to Besso’s family: Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein died on 18 April 1955, a few weeks after he wrote those words:“But our language, which has built in to it our subjective feeling of time passing, struggles to deal with these
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