Getting Away With It

It used to be the case that L.A. seemed utterly different from Eastern cities in one crucial way: it was already hauntingly apocalyptic, a place of steep hills, deep predator-filled canyons, terrible earthquakes, and winds bearing plutonium from Japan. The first month I lived here I cowered in my bed at night as the helicopters passed over, thinking there was an ongoing series of manhunts. (And there was, for a while—Christopher Dorner was on the loose.) One day, I told a West Coast friend about my night-terror and he looked at me like I was slow, then said, carefully, “They’re traffic helicopters.

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time-bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth…

I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.