Being and Becoming

Does time flow, or is reality a static four-dimensional block?

Modern cosmology often presents itself as the most triumphant extension of physics: a discipline that has traced the history of the universe from fractions of a second after the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets. Yet beneath this empirical success lies a persistent and unavoidable metaphysical tension.

This is the tension between understanding the universe as a timeless structure governed by invariant laws, as opposed to a universe understood as an unfolding process shaped by time, change and history. Is the universe a 'complete being' or is it still 'becoming'?

If the universe is a 'complete being', unchanging and stable, there can be certainty regarding the laws of physics upon which everything operates. But if it is in the process of 'becoming', its shape, mechanism and the very firmament of its structure may be undergoing change, which would render all discovered laws of physics temporary and revisable.

At first glance, equations of physics that describe spacetime curvature, models that explain cosmic expansion, and simulations that reproduce large-scale structure ensure the triumphal success of physical cosmology. However, this confidence dissolves once we ask more fundamental questions: What is time in cosmology? What does it mean for the universe to "begin"? Are laws prior to the universe, or emergent within it?

These are not technical questions resolvable by better instruments or more math. They are questions that question the very conceptual framework through which physics itself becomes intelligible — they are questions of metaphysics.

This tension between Being and Becoming was recorded in early Greek philosophy. Parmenides presented reality as timeless, unified and changeless — the true Being admits no coming-to-being or passing-away. Heraclitus, by contrast, insisted that reality is flux, change is fundamental, and stability is an illusion born of limited perception.

Modern cosmology is forced to reside in this fault line. On one side, cosmology relies on Being-like commitments. The laws of physics are treated as timeless, universal and mathematically exact. Einstein's field equations do not evolve in time; they are valid everywhere and always. Symmetry principles, conservation laws and invariances reflect a metaphysics of Being.

Rather, Einstein's relativity replaces time with spacetime, where past, present and future all exist as different dimensions of the same reality. It's like three dimensions of space and one of time, together making a 4D spacetime, wherein not objects but events are located at different coordinates in spacetime.

The metaphysics of Being holds the universe as a four-dimensional spacetime block, where events don't 'come into existence'; they are simply located in different dimensions of spacetime. The universe is something stable, where past, present, and future coexist equally in 4D spacetime — where time does not flow; it simply is. Change is not something that 'happens'; it is something that is 'described'.

On the other side, cosmology is equally committed to Becoming. The universe has a history. It expanded, cooled, formeda structure and excessively generated novelty. Even as of now, spacetime is not static — galaxies condense, stars ignite, elements are forged, and complexity is accumulating. Inflationary scenarios, phase transitions and structure formation are all narratives of transformation. Cosmology is, at its core, a historical science. It reconstructs what happened billions of years ago to prove its 'now'.

When a star begins as a gas cloud, becomes a main-sequence star, and ends as a white dwarf, these are three different realities, not three ways to look at a single static reality. One reality has ended or completed its course to give way to the next. Cosmology is not just a description; it is a process. The universe is doing something, not just existing. In a Becoming universe, time is dynamic, and the universe is constantly generating the present. In this view, the past is fixed, the future is not yet real and is open to possibilities, and the present is where reality is unceasingly happening.

Quantum Theory has added the feature of 'indeterminacy' in reality. Reality is now a set of probabilities, not certainties. And the outcomes of these probabilities are not fixed in advance; they will turn into realities only after their measurement. For example, a radioactive atom does not have a predetermined decay time, and it chooses its decay time from a set of probabilities. In this realm, reality is historic, the past is fixed, but the active present and the future are a set of unascertained choices. The arrow of time that has travelled a defined path in its past is 'now' at a juncture that is opened to many choices — the line can change its path in an unpredictable new direction at every 'now'.

'Time' may be just one dimension of reality, but reimaging and redefining it changes the entire picture of reality as we understand it; a new picture that may require a completely new set of physical laws to explain it. Add in that the way we understand other universals like space, gravity, light, and electromagnetism. If science gives further clues that force us to reimagine these universals too, how different reality would seem to us then.

Rather, we must ask whether the many universal entities that together form the reality we experience are all different dimensions of a single reality, i.e. is there a fundamental fixed reality that mirrors itself in different transformations, each giving a completely different experience to the observer, and each having a certain range of possibilities within its bounded infinity?

Perhaps the universe is a fundamental fixed bounded infinity, within which each of its elemental properties act within a bounded range of choices, so that looking from outside we find a complete being, static and unchanging, yet when we experience it from inside, we experience it as a dynamic, ever-changing system that generates novelty, history and the arrow of time, as it interacts within its elements. Perhaps the Being of the universe is a fundamental that allows within it the Becoming of so many interacting and even emerging realities.

So, is reality a true Being that admits no coming-to-being or passing-away or is flux and change its fundamental nature? Does one static, unchanging reality reflect different images upon human experience, or is every experience a proof of a separate, independent reality? Is time static and unchanging, and strangling us too, in its determined singular path? Or, is it a flux that allows possibilities and generates bounded infinities — and creates for every particle of the Universe, a space to breathe, a choice to make?