I once had a serious conversation with colleagues about whether time actually exists.
Not as a thought experiment. As a professional question. GPS satellites orbit at altitudes where Einstein’s relativity is not theoretical — it is an engineering problem. Time moves measurably differently up there than it does down here. If you don’t account for it, your positioning errors compound at roughly 11 kilometers per day. We built corrections into the system because we had to.
So what exactly is time? A physical reality? A convenient framework for tracking cause and effect? A human invention that breaks down at sufficient scale or velocity? I have sat in rooms with serious people and asked that question without a satisfying answer.
I did not expect Cairo to answer it either. But it came closer than the conference rooms did.
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Standing inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza, I felt something I don’t have precise language for. The chamber is small, quieter than you expect, cut from granite blocks fitted together with a precision that still confounds engineers. I stood there and felt the past moving through the present like a current through water.
Not metaphorically. Sensorially.
I started thinking of it as a flip book. You know the kind — each page is a single still image, and when you run your thumb across them the pictures animate. Standing in that chamber, I felt like I could run my thumb across time itself. The same coordinates, different centuries. The king being carried to his burial chamber. Priests performing rituals by torchlight. Tourists in 2022 taking photographs with their phones.
All of it at the same address.
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Later that day I visited a place in Cairo where the Holy Family lived — Mary, Joseph, and Jesus — during their flight from Herod. A small room. A piece of floor. A stone curb worn smooth.
I have felt God’s spiritual presence many times. I am Pentecostal; that is not unfamiliar territory. But I had never before stood in a specific physical location where Jesus actually was. Not symbolically. Corporally. The same floor. The same air, more or less. A boy who scraped his knee here and probably cried, and his mother shushed him and held him on that stone curb.
I stood there for a long time.
The flip book again. But this time I wasn’t running my thumb across history. I was standing in the middle of it, and it was running through me.
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I am a physicist by training. I have spent decades working on systems that only function because we take seriously the idea that time is not fixed, not universal, not what it appears to be from the ground.
I still don’t know if time exists in any ultimate sense.
But I know that room in Cairo exists. And I know something happened there that I am still thinking about two years later.
Have you ever stood somewhere and felt the past move through you — not as a concept, but as a physical sensation?
Talenton 