Sir, - It is surely misleading for Dr William Reville (Science Today, October 19th) to claim so dogmatically that time variously "moves", "passes", or even "marches forward" (sic). His statements ignore that growing mass of informed scholarship which concludes the opposite: that time doesn't really "move" but only people do.
This case is supported by the absence of any real present in the laws of physics - and also the well-known "static" interpretation of Einstein's relativity or spacetime. Since the mid-1950s it has been strengthened by many leading commentators, eg Paul Davies and Roger Penrose recently. So a growing consensus now supports the primal contention of Parmenides (500 BC) that time really doesn't "move" at all!
Dr Reville is further remiss on the nature of "time's arrow" - another familiar metaphor from ancient thought. For, as clarified by Stephen Hawking, for example, this classic "arrow" metaphor is best considered as an indicator of direction - much like a traffic sign. It's not a projectile which must necessarily move as Reville holds.
Time may then show a clear past-to-future direction (through entropy etc), much as a sloping hillside exhibits up-down trend. But it by no means follows that such frameworks must also "move" as well.
It therefore now seems quite unlikely that time really "moves", "passes", or indeed "marches forward" as Dr Reville rashly claims. More likely we humans - through our mysterious consciousness - somehow "move on" through time instead.
Finally, time's modern problems may well resemble those of the "passing" sun c. 1500 AD. Nothing could then have appeared more obvious than that the sun moves daily past ourselves. The converse actuality of Copernicus - that we pass round the sun - must have seemed infinitely more counter-intuitive to most people then.
Likewise our untested notion that "time passes by us" may yet be seen as humanity's pathetic last bastion of egocentricity in an ever more bewildering world!
Or, more aphoristically: Tempus non fugit, sed fugimus! - Yours, etc.,
Dr Sean O'Donnell,
Shantalla Road,
Galway.