It has long been accepted that time as we know it, or at the very least, in the sense

that we experience it, is not what it seems.

Or as Albert Einstein put it, the past, the present, and the future is but a stubborn,

persistent, illusion.

It would seem that we have long been mesmerized by the notion of travelling through time,

whether it be to write a past wrong, or merely to escape our present reality.

But it wasn't until Einstein's special relativity introduced us to the tantalizing concept

of space time and the fourth dimension that such notions were given mathematical credibility.

No longer was time a mere subjective unit of measurement, but suddenly we were invited

to imagine it as a space within which we might move.

A theory that has the earlier quote suggests did a way entirely with any notion of past,

present, and future, or to be clearer as physicist Max Teigmark notes.

Time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.

So much in the way that matter may appear differently from one observer to the next.

So too, according to Einstein, does time.

Incidentally, although the concept of space time is often linked with Einstein, it was

actually his teacher Hermann Minkowski, who first proposed the idea back in 1908 in a paper

titled Space and Time.

Remarkably, author Edgar Allan Poe is believed to have come to the same realization himself

as far back as 1848, writing in an essay titled Eureka that space and duration are one.

Certainly it is an area that has been well explored in fiction.

The oddly unsettling 1970s television show Sapphire and Steel and Joan Lindsay's haunting

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