What came first, the chicken or the egg? Normally we’d expect the explanation to run one way—the chicken laid the first egg, or the egg hatched the first chicken. But what if a future chicken could influence the egg before it hatched? That nonintuitive idea has weight when you consider a concept that some physicists are mulling over: that all of time exists all at once.
Welcome to the “block universe,” where the future influences the past, everything that will happen already has, and the nature of free will is debatable.
The way we perceive the cosmos normally is that time flows forward. We get older, our planet revolves around the sun, the universe moves inextricably forward from the Big Bang. But in the block universe interpretation of reality, we don’t actually need to invoke time in this way to explain how things work.
“There’s no flow of time in the block universe,” says Emily Adlam, PhD, an assistant professor of the philosophy of quantum mechanics at Chapman University. “Time is just another dimension, like all the dimensions of space.” It’s akin to the directions “left” and “right” we’re all familiar with, and which both exist simultaneously. Time’s directions—the past and the future—likewise both exist simultaneously, she explains.
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