Space Time: A Brilliant Illusion We Can’t Stop Using

Why Say Space Time Doesn’t “Exist”?

At first glance, declaring that space time doesn’t exist sounds like splitting hairs or worse, academic wordplay. After all, Einstein gave us this sweeping four dimensional framework, and physicists have leaned on it ever since. So how could it not exist?

But here’s the trick: what we call “space time” is a model, not a substance. It’s a way of mapping when and where things happen, kind of like drawing a subway map. The map is incredibly useful you’d be lost in New York without one but the colored lines don’t exist underground. They’re just a smart shorthand for the messy reality of tunnels, trains, and people on the move.

Space time, in the same sense, is a map of events. It helps us calculate, predict, and understand. But calling the map the territory saying space time itself exists can tangle us in unnecessary confusion.

The Everyday Trap of Thinking Events “Exist”

Think about your own past for a second. That time you chipped a tooth on a popcorn kernel, or the exact moment you first got good news about a job offer. It’s easy to picture those events as still “out there,” somewhere, waiting in storage. Pop culture plays into this all the time. Movies like Back to the Future or Tenet imagine that past events are locations you can travel to, tweak, or revisit if you’ve got the right gadget.

Philosophers have formalized these intuitions with big names: eternalism (all moments exist, past to future), presentism (only the now is real), and the “growing block” view (the past and present exist, while the future rolls in gradually). Even general relativity Einstein’s grand framework nudges us toward imagining time as a dimension much like space, with all events laid out in a vast continuum.

But the trouble, as Daryl Janzen points out, is with the word “exist.” Events don’t exist in the way your coffee mug exists on your desk. They happen, then they’re over. Treating a happening like a permanent object is mixing categories in a way that leads us into philosophical dead ends.

What Physics Actually Does with Space Time

In physics, space time is an indispensable bookkeeping device. It’s the ledger that keeps track of every event from galaxies colliding billions of years ago to you reading this sentence right now. An “event” here just means something that occurs at a particular spot and instant.

For example, if you draw a simple space time diagram of a car cruising at a steady speed, you’ll have time on one axis and position on the other. Each dot represents where the car is at a given moment. Connect the dots, and you get a line the car’s “worldline,” the record of its journey.

But of course, the real car is also hurtling around the Sun on a rotating Earth, which itself is being carried along in the Milky Way. To keep track of that with accuracy, you need the full four dimensional framework of space time. So physicists use it constantly, not because it’s “real” in the same sense as a car or a city, but because it’s the best system we’ve ever devised to describe motion and relationships.

Do Events Have the Same Kind of Existence as Objects?

This is where definitions matter. Objects endure. A chair in your living room will (with luck) still be there tomorrow. You can walk up to it again and again. Events aren’t like that. They vanish as soon as they occur.

Mixing those categories pretending events “exist” like objects creates weird problems. It’s what gives rise to those dizzying time travel paradoxes. If past events still exist as revisitable locations, you can step into them and mess with them. But if events simply happen and then are gone, the paradox evaporates. There’s nothing back there to visit.

Janzen’s point is simple but sharp: events don’t exist. They occur. And when we forget that distinction, we end up confusing our models for reality itself.

The Illusion of the Block Universe

A lot of 20th century philosophy of time wrestled with tense: what does it mean for something to be past, present, or future? People started to argue that if events can be labeled differently from different perspectives, then maybe time itself is unreal, maybe the “flow” of time is an illusion.

But again, this all hinges on treating events like objects in a block universe that already exists in total. If you clear away that assumption, things look different. Tense isn’t a property of existing objects it’s a way we describe relations among happenings. Yesterday’s storm doesn’t exist somewhere in storage; it happened. Tomorrow’s sunrise doesn’t exist yet; it will happen. That distinction dissolves the illusion that time must be a frozen block.

Relativity as Math, Not Ontology

Even relativity, dazzling as it is, doesn’t force us to accept space time as a “thing.” It’s a mathematical framework. It tells us how to calculate trajectories, predict gravitational bending, and measure simultaneity relative to motion. But saying the four dimensional continuum exists as a literal object that bends is a leap beyond what the theory itself requires.

It’s like mistaking a weather map for the storm itself. The map bends and warps when you redraw the jet stream, but no one thinks the map is the storm. The same holds for relativity’s elegant diagrams: indispensable, yes, but not reality itself.

Why This Distinction Matters

At first, this might seem like semantics, but it actually matters a lot. Our language shapes how we think about reality. If we convince ourselves that all events “exist,” we start believing in paradoxes and illusions that sprout from that assumption.

Recognizing that space time is a framework, not a thing, helps clear the fog. It doesn’t make relativity any less powerful, or quantum mechanics any less weird. It just grounds us: models describe the world, but they’re not the world.

And honestly, there’s something liberating in that. It means time really does flow, events really do pass, and the future is genuinely open not sitting there fully formed, waiting for us to stumble into it.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: TheConversation