Abstract

FOR MANY YEARS the received wisdom--proclaimed by certain physicists and philosophers of physics and received by certain metaphysicians--was that, in Bertrand Russell's inimitable phrase, "time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present." Moreover, according to Russell, "it is a mere accident that we have no memory of the future"--presumably because the future, regarded as no less determinate than the past, is held to be equally "there" to be known and hence "remembered."