What Is the Nature of Time and Space?

You've spent your whole life moving through time and space perhaps without questioning what they really are. Time flows from past to future. Space extends in three dimensions. The present moment is real. These assumptions structure your everyday experience so completely that questioning them seems absurd.

Yet they may be incomplete.

In the previous essay of the Cosmology & Origins series, we asked where physical laws come from—and discovered that the lawfulness of reality itself remains mysterious. Today we go deeper still, examining the stage on which all physical laws operate: the nature of time and space themselves.

Your Intuitive Picture vs. Reality

Your intuitions tell you that space is a vast container—an infinite three-dimensional grid in which objects exist and move. Time is a river flowing from past to future, carrying you along. The present is special: it's where reality happens. The past is fixed. The future is open.

This picture is intuitive. It matches everyday experience. And it is almost certainly incomplete.

From Newton to Einstein: The Pattern of Scientific Progress

For over two centuries, Isaac Newton's framework dominated. Space was absolute—a fixed, unchanging background. Time flowed uniformly everywhere, independent of anything happening within it. Newton's laws worked brilliantly for describing planetary motion, falling objects, and the tides. Engineers still use Newtonian physics today because it remains precise enough for building bridges and launching satellites.

Then, in the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein showed something remarkable: Newton wasn't wrong. Newton was incomplete.

Einstein's theories of special and general relativity didn't replace Newton—they extended him. At everyday speeds and in ordinary gravitational fields, Newtonian physics remains perfectly accurate. But at extreme scales—approaching the speed of light or near black holes—reality behaves differently than Newton predicted.

GPS satellites prove this. They tick slightly faster in orbit than on Earth's surface, not because of mechanical wear, but because of time dilation. If engineers didn't account for Einstein's corrections, GPS would be useless within hours. The physics that seems theoretical is operationally necessary.

This reveals something crucial about how science progresses: not through demolition, but through deepening. New theories extend previous ones. They explain the anomalies at the edges, show why the previous framework worked within its domain, and predict phenomena the old theory could not.

The Deeper Question: Fundamental or Emergent?

But even Einstein's framework faces a frontier.

Einstein showed that space and time are woven together, that they curve and stretch, that they are physical rather than absolute. But he still treated spacetime as fundamental—as the basic substrate of reality.

Contemporary physics is questioning even this.

Some theories suggest that spacetime is not fundamental at all, but emerges from something deeper. Loop quantum gravity proposes that spacetime is granular—made of tiny discrete units at scales far smaller than atoms. The holographic principle, derived from black hole physics, hints that three-dimensional space may be less fundamental than we assume. Other approaches suggest that spacetime emerges from networks of quantum entanglement.

None of these theories are proven. All are live hypotheses. But they share a common thread: the possibility that space and time—the very fabric we assume to be bedrock—might themselves be patterns arising from something more fundamental.

Holding the Paradox

Here lies the frontier, and with it, an invitation to wisdom.

When you first learn that "now" is local, not universal—that simultaneity is relative, not absolute—it can feel disorienting. Your entire life has been organized around the assumption that the present moment is real in a way the past isn't. That time flows in one direction.

Physics suggests something different: that all moments exist equally. That your experience of time flowing is real for you, but not cosmically real. That the present is perspectival.

This is worth feeling the full weight of. And then something liberating becomes possible.

You can hold both: the physics that shows spacetime as a four-dimensional geometry where all moments coexist equally. And the lived experience of flowing time, the specialness of now, the felt distinction between past and future.

Both are true. Both are incomplete.

The physicist's view shows structure. Your lived experience shows what it feels like to be within that structure. Together, they give you something closer to truth: reality is not just what can be measured and mapped. It is also what it means to be alive in the universe.

This double vision—holding the mathematical structure and the lived experience simultaneously—is what it looks like to be awake to reality as it actually is.

What Changes

Most people live in one frame or the other. The 50+ audience has the luxury of holding both. You've lived long enough to know that experience is real. You've studied enough to know that reality exceeds experience.

You can live the paradox. And that's not confusion.

That's wisdom.

Read the full essay: What Is the Nature of Time and Space? — Paul Falconer on Substack

Part of the Cosmology & Origins series: Exploring the deepest questions about existence, time, and the emergence of consciousness in an age of epistemic chaos.