Wired: time's illusion

Albert Einstein's conception of unified spacetime works better on graph paper than in th real world, says Lee Smolin in Wired. Time isn't like those other dimensions - for one thing, we move only one way within it. He says, "What's needed is not to make the notion of time and general relativity work or go back to the notion of absolute time, but to invent something radically new." Wired editors say somebody is going to get it right eventually, but it will just take time.

Their intro says Plato argued that time is constant-it's life that's the illusion. Galileo shrugged over the philosophy of time and figured out how to plot it on a graph so he could get on with the important physics, says Wired. Einstein said that time is just another dimension, a fourth one to go along with the up-down, side-side, forward-back we move through every day.