"The past exists in its memory and the future in its anticipation, and both of these are now, for when the world is inspected directly and clearly, past and future times are nowhere to be found." -Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

“All time is here in this body, which is the body of Buddha. The past exists in its memory and the future in its anticipation, and both of these are now, for when the world is inspected directly and clearly, past and future times are nowhere to be found.”

-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

Scientists are quickly coming to the same conclusion that Alan Watts refers to above regarding the illusion of time. Among physicists, the possibility that time may not exist is known  as the “problem of time.” Tim Folger describes this temporal conundrum in Discover Magazine, Newsflash: Time May Not Exist.

“The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience?”

“The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford.

Current atomic clocks are accurate to one second per every 30,000 years. Nonetheless, may scientists like Carlo Rovelli suggest "The fundamental description of the universe must be timeless."

“The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.”

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” -Albert Einstein

“No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.”

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says [MIT quantum mechanical engineer Seth]Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

"There is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere." Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

This new breakthrough suggests that physicists need to stop playing this game of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable. Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time.

In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

-Tim Folger, Newflash: Time May Not Exist