Reference: The Book of Physics
Note: The original text is provided below.
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Summary
The information that we can directly perceive is limited to the lower cone. We may call it the region of absolute past. Information for rest of the region has to be calculated. The actual difference between time and space seems to be that time represents the state of awareness; whereas, space represents what one is aware of.
Our knowledge of the world comes from the inference and interpretation of our physical and mental sensations. Space is more than the three mathematical dimensions. Space may refer to all the dimensions of this universe. Time has to do with awareness. There are many dimensions of consciousness too.
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Comments
Eddington’s view of time and space is subjective and difficult to understand.
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Original Text
By dividing the world into Absolute Past and Future on the one hand and Absolute Elsewhere on the other hand, our hour-glasses have restored a fundamental differentiation between time and space. It is not a distinction between time and space as they appear in a space-time frame, but a distinction between temporal and spatial relations. Events can stand to us in a temporal relation (absolutely past or future) or a spatial relation (absolutely elsewhere), but not in both. The temporal relations radiate into the past and future cones and the spatial relations into the neutral wedge; they are kept absolutely separated by the Seen-Now lines which we have identified with the grain of absolute structure in the world. We have recovered the distinction which the Astronomer Royal confused when he associated time with the merely artificial Now lines.
I would direct your attention to an important difference in our apprehension of time-extension and space-extension. As already explained our course through the world is into the absolute future, i.e. along a sequence of time-relations. We can never have a similar experience of a sequence of space-relations because that would involve travelling with velocity greater than light. Thus we have immediate experience of the time-relation but not of the space-relation. Our knowledge of space-relations is indirect, like nearly all our knowledge of the external world—a matter of inference and interpretation of the impressions which reach us through our senseorgans. We have similar indirect knowledge of the time-relations existing between the events in the world outside us; but in addition we have direct experience of the time-relations that we ourselves are traversing— a knowledge of time not coming through external sense-organs, but taking a short cut into our consciousness. When I close my eyes and retreat into my inner mind, I feel myself enduring, I do not feel myself extensive. It is this feeling of time as affecting ourselves and not merely as existing in the relations of external events which is so peculiarly characteristic of it; space on the other hand is always appreciated as something external.
That is why time seems to us so much more mysterious than space. We know nothing about the intrinsic nature of space, and so it is quite easy to conceive it satisfactorily. We have intimate acquaintance with the nature of time and so it baffles our comprehension. It is the same paradox which makes us believe we understand the nature of an ordinary table whereas the nature of human personality is altogether mysterious. We never have that intimate contact with space and tables which would make us realise how mysterious they are; we have direct knowledge of time and of the human spirit which makes us reject as inadequate that merely symbolic conception of the world which is so often mistaken for an insight into its nature.
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