Real time

KG Denbigh wrote in 1981 that physics treats time as a simple continuum: “It knows of no means of picking out a unique moment, the now or the present. The t-coordinate is an undifferentiated continuum, and, if this coordinate is ‘taken for real’ as has been the tendency among many scientists and philosophers, the familiar distinction between past, present and future, so important in human affairs, comes to be regarded as a mere peculiarity of consciousness. It is as if every event along the coordinate is, in some sense, ‘equally real’ even those events which (to us) ‘have not yet happened.’ On this view of matter it is a function of consciousness that we ‘come across’ those events, experiencing the formality, as it has been said, of the events ‘taking place.’”

But of course, a time in which every time is equally present is fundamentally a-temporal, which is precisely what Newtonian absolute time is.