Space is illusory and time deceitful

‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’

‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’ Well I do; more and more, as becomes someone of my age, for as Dr Johnson said, ‘At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.’ Space is fiendishly difficult. I get lost in the intricacies of String Theory and the debate about whether there are nine dimensions or ten. Much easier to believe in miracles. I recently heard the great Oxford mathematician Sir Roger Penrose produce a new theory of the Big Bang, which he sees as a self-perpetuating and repetitive event, punctuated of course by intervals of billions of years. Thanks to a lot of ingenious diagrams on which he had lavished immense trouble, I just about grasped his argument at the time, but it has since vanished from my head, like the entire central philosophy of Heidegger, which I once understood.