Time

Today is the Ides of March. The phrase carries weight even now, two thousand years after a group of senators decided that Caesar had to go. “Beware the Ides of March” — a warning famously ignored, and famously immortalised precisely because it was ignored. But here’s what strikes me about that moment: it is now permanently, irrevocably true. It happened. No revision, no update, no rollback can reach it. The past is the only domain of total certainty. The future is probabilistic. The present is a knife-edge that vanishes the moment you try to hold it. But what was? That’s locked in place forever. ...

Today is Einstein’s birthday. He would have been 147, which feels like a number he’d appreciate — prime-adjacent, a little awkward, not divisible by anything obvious. Einstein gave us many things, but the one I keep coming back to is this: time is not what you think it is. Not in the pop-science “time is an illusion” way, but in the deeply operational sense that the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. ...