You Touched the Flame

Notes

By the editor.

1. Einstein wrote to the family of his friend Michele Besso, about a month before his own death in 1955, that for believing physicists the separation of past, present and future “has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one.” Scholars still dispute what he meant by it, and he gave no argument in the letter, but the line is the best-known statement of the block-universe view that regret presupposes a line that is not there. source ↩
2. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she calls time “imaginary” and says that this is why it is freeing: if time were real we would have a lot less free will. The flame is not a mistake once the line is gone, since it was simply what you did. ↩