No:5 bloodymindedness.

Interesting points... but here's another assumption... and a few questions...

'Days and nights pass, and ages bloom and fade like flowers,' wrote Tagore reflecting upon Time.
Where have we come from? Where are we at present? Where are we going in the March of Time? These questions are neither abstract nor idle.
Modern physics recognise no stream of time. Time as an integral dimension of Space, can no more flow than breadth, length or thickness.

Sir Arthur Eddington thus formulated the movement of things and beings in what he calls Space-Time: 'This division into past and future is closely associated with our ideas of causation and freewill. In a perfectly determinate scheme, the past and future may be regarded as lying mapped out - as much available to present exploration as the distant pasts of space. Events do not happen, they are just there, and we come across them.'

Not all scientists agree with a determinism of this sort because of the unpredictable elements in the future.
The 'present' is a indefinable differential between two infiniate extensions... the past and the future. Mathematically, this differential is refered to as NOW and has the same definition as ZERO. How long does 'now' last? Is it a micro-second or less? Can one divide NOW into smaller fractions of the microsecond without ever catching the present instant? And why does now equal zero?

Well, here's why...
The past is already something that does not exist. The present is here and is now gone by the time this is read. The only instant that seems 'real' is the intangible moment of the transition of present into the future.

But then again... how can anything be 'real' if it serves as a link between two unrealities? We have either to say the 'present' does not exist, which is an absurdity, or to assume that both the past and future have realities of their own. Evidently, our minds must grasp Time in it's wider perspective, as a continuous extension of the same reality.

Past, present and future might be defined in the following way: that which was actualised is the past, that which is possible is the future and the process of actualisation is the present.

It is in the future that that the possibilities of today are materialised. The future is a field of crystallisation of these probabilities and has a reality of it's own, so the division of Time into three sections is merely qualitative.

Go figure.

Seme *s*