The coffee pot was dripping its last efforts in the theoretical physics laboratory. The clock read 11:32 am and the screen of an oscilloscope was blinking uselessly in one corner.

The two men were sitting at a table littered with papers, cables and a cup of coffee grounds that could easily date back to the Big Bang.

Diego was a programmer who had become a writer for several years. At that moment he asked his friend - “Let’s see, Gabriel, explain this to me again because my brain is still tied to the 20th century. You say that time does not exist. Ok, but my watch insists on contradicting you.”

Gabriel, who was a professor of theoretical physics, tried to explain to him : “Your watch doesn’t measure time, Diego, it measures changes. It’s like an odometer of the universe. But time itself ... is pure illusion.”

Diego retorted , “How the hell do we live in an illusion? Isn’t this a very sophisticated way of saying “carpe diem” with scientific words?”

Gabriel smiled as he responded to his friend’s quip . “Not exactly. You see, Julian Barbour’s idea is that the universe is not a movie in which time flows, but a collection of static frames. Each instant, each ‘now’, exists independently of the others. There is no past that flows into the future; there is only a big photo album of the universe that your consciousness is flipping through.”

Diego was hesitant - “So, time is just a bad slide show?”

Gabriel tried to explain - “More or less. Imagine you open your code editor and instead of seeing one line of execution, you see all the states of the program at once. You choose which one to look at, but in reality, all the states already exist.”

Diego hesitated . “Wait. If all moments exist at once, does that mean the future is already written?”

Gabriel nodded . “Not exactly. What we call ’the future’ is just another page in the album, but no one tells you what order to turn them in. The illusion of time comes from the way our consciousness jumps from one state to another. But those states are not ordered by any cosmic entity.”

Diego asked incredulously , “So time is like a video game where all the frames are already rendered, but I only see one at a time ... Am I trapped in a bad graphics engine of reality?”

Gabriel explained patiently , “Rather, you are a character in a game where all possible games already exist, but you only experience one of them.”

Diego continued to doubt - “What about causality? You can’t tell me that if I jump off the roof now, I won’t break a leg on another page of the album.”

Gabriel nodded . “Of course, because in the great album of the universe, there are pages where you made the decision not to jump and others where you did. But it’s not like time carries you from one to the other like a river. You, your consciousness, are the one who jumps between them, and each ‘I’ that experiences each page believes that time flows, when in reality, everything is already there.”

Diego doubted the theory - “I mean, I’m a kind of traveler who glides through a collection of static ’nows’...” -

Gabriel nodded again . “Exactly. Now you’re getting it. But you can only travel one way because your consciousness is tied to a specific direction of those jumps.”

Diego seemed confused - “And why only in one direction? Why can’t I jump to the past?” -

Gabriel tried to explain it to him - “Because consciousness is a process that follows the rules of entropy. As we experience successive states, the information in our brain is reorganized in an increasing direction of complexity. Your memory only accumulates new data, it never erases the old. That’s why you remember the past, but you can’t remember the future. If you could jump into the past, you would be in a “now” where your consciousness doesn’t have the memories of the present, and you would simply live that instant without knowing that you have experienced it before.” -

Diego opened his eyes –”I’m sorry, I can’t understand it”-

Gabriel explained patiently – “Because consciousness is a process that follows the rules of entropy. As we experience successive states, the information in our brain is reorganized in an increasing direction of complexity. Your memory only accumulates new data, it never erases old data. That is why you remember the past, but you cannot remember the future.”