A report on Present, Past, Future and Time

The present is a moment in time discernible as intermediate between past and future.
Everything is in the Past (Vassily Maximov, 1889).
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his future in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
The flow of sand in an hourglass can be used to measure the passage of time. It also concretely represents the present as being between the past and the future.
A visualisation of the present (dark blue plane) and past and future light cones in 2D space.
Thoughts of the Past (John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1859)
A visualization of the future light cone (at the top), the present, and the past light cone in 2D space.
Horizontal sundial in Taganrog
Project of an orbital colony Stanford torus, painted by Donald E. Davis
An old kitchen clock
Print (c. 1902) by Albert Robida showing a futuristic view of air travel over Paris in the year 2000 as people leave the opera.
A contemporary quartz watch, 2007
Chip-scale atomic clocks, such as this one unveiled in 2004, are expected to greatly improve GPS location.
Scale of time in Jain texts shown logarithmically
Time's mortal aspect is personified in this bronze statue by Charles van der Stappen.
Two-dimensional space depicted in three-dimensional spacetime. The past and future light cones are absolute, the "present" is a relative concept different for observers in relative motion.
Relativity of simultaneity: Event B is simultaneous with A in the green reference frame, but it occurred before in the blue frame, and occurs later in the red frame.
Views of spacetime along the world line of a rapidly accelerating observer in a relativistic universe. The events ("dots") that pass the two diagonal lines in the bottom half of the image (the past light cone of the observer in the origin) are the events visible to the observer.
Philosopher and psychologist William James

The present (or here and now) is the time that is associated with the events perceived directly and in the first time, not as a recollection (perceived more than once) or a speculation (predicted, hypothesis, uncertain).

- Present

The future is the time after the past and present.

- Future

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.

- Time

It is a period of time between the past and the future, and can vary in meaning from being an instant to a day or longer.

- Present

The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future.

- Past

The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience time, and is accessed through memory and recollection.

- Past
The present is a moment in time discernible as intermediate between past and future.

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