Past
Present
Future
Latex on canvas
24" X 30"

Time is a difficult concept in physics. Newtonian mechanics cannot discriminate between time moving forward or backward. To deal with the fact that time only moves forward, physicists use the concept of "The Arrow of Time," which artificially points forward. Einsteinian relativity theory treats time as just another dimension on a par with the three spatial dimensions. Only in thermodynamics does the arrow of time rear its ugly head, insisting that entropy (the total amount of disorder in the Universe) always increases as time moves forward.

Philosophically, time is best understood via the following chant:
The future's but a probability field.
The past is footsteps in the snow
The present moment is all we have.

This painting depicts this philosophical view of time. Colors at the bottom represent all the possibilities for future events converging to the present. At the present, one of these events explodes into actuality, while all the others are annihilated. The one remaining event shoots like a beam of memory - now devoid of color - upward into the past, but slowly fades away as it grows older.