Einstein’s equations work. They describe gravity with breathtaking accuracy, bending starlight and predicting black holes. But their success has seduced us into mistaking a mathematical map for the territory itself. We’ve begun to speak as if time were literally a dimension—another axis alongside height, width, and depth—so that the universe becomes a frozen four-dimensional block where past, present, and future all coexist.
It’s a beautiful picture. It’s also wrong. In quantum physics, time doesn’t behave like space; it isn’t an observable or an operator, but an external parameter we use to track change. In thermodynamics, entropy increase defines an arrow that no coordinate system can erase. And in information theory, reality isn’t a finished database of facts but a continual process of distinguishing what is from what could be. Change isn’t something that happens in time—change creates time.
The block universe takes the relationships described by geometry and mistakes them for the thing itself. It reifies a coordinate system and then wonders why motion, causation, and becoming feel like illusions. But when we look closely, physics doesn’t freeze the world; it reveals that the world’s very existence is dynamic—an ongoing act of realization. Time isn’t a place we move through; it’s the measure of the universe moving, moment by moment, into being.