Time — The Persistent Illusion
“If you try to keep time in your hands, it always slides through your fingers”
(Julián Barbour)
The evocative image in Salvador Dalí’s painting of the melting clocks is recognized worldwide. It is believed these clocks are a representation of time in the Theory of Relativity formulated by Albert Einstein.
When Dalí was asked about the meaning, he said they were nothing more than a surrealistic perception of soft cheese under the Sun. The ant plague on one of the pocket watches is a symbol that appears in more paintings, and it is generally accepted as a symbol of death and deterioration.
Dalí said he painted this to systematize the confusion, and thus, help to completely discredit the appreciation we have about reality itself.
In 1952, the extraordinary Ray Bradbury wrote a story called A sound of thunder, in which a company of time-travel safaris offers dinosaur hunts for its richest clients.
The system of this safari apparently is designed so the travelers cannot introduce any modification in the destination, except for the hunted animals, which anyway would have died immediately for other reasons.
However, one of the hunters inadvertently steps on a butterfly. When the travelers return, they find a world very different from the one they had abandoned: the slight alteration caused in the past by the hunter, has detonated a cascade of events changing the course of history.
Fernando Velázquez‘ article was published in Wall Street International on 26 January 2018. Go to Original.
Source: https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2018/01/31/time-the-persistent-illusion/
