Time Between Dr. Mostafa Mahmoudand Albert Einstein: A Philosophical Reflection on Relativity and Human Perception

The Egyptian philosopher and physician Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud frequently challenged his readers to question what appears self-evident. Among his most profound reflections was a deceptively simple question: Do human beings truly live in the present, or is their experience of reality inevitably rooted in the past?

Although philosophical in form, this question draws its inspiration from one of the most significant scientific revolutions of the twentieth century—Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Einstein demonstrated that the speed of light is finite and constant, approximately 300,000 kilometres per second. Because light travels at a limited speed, every observation involves a delay. Consequently, information from distant objects reaches the observer only after a measurable interval of time.

For example, a star located one thousand light-years from Earth is observed not as it exists today, but as it existed one thousand years ago. Should that star have ceased to exist a century ago, its disappearance would remain unknown to us for another nine hundred years until the last photons carrying that information finally arrived.

Modern astrophysics therefore establishes an important principle: observing the universe is simultaneously an act of looking into its past. This conclusion is not philosophical speculation but a direct consequence of contemporary physics.

It is precisely at this point that Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud begins his philosophical inquiry.

If our knowledge of the universe is always mediated by signals that require time to reach us, can we ever claim to perceive reality exactly as it exists at the present moment? Might many celestial bodies have vanished long ago while their images continue to occupy our skies simply because their light is still travelling toward us?

From this perspective, Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud distinguished between two complementary dimensions of time.

The first is objective (external) time—the measurable time of clocks, calendars, astronomy, and physical science.

The second is subjective (internal) time—the lived experience of duration within human consciousness. A single minute of anxiety may feel unbearably long, while hours of happiness often seem to pass almost instantaneously. Psychological experience therefore reveals that time possesses a subjective dimension alongside its measurable physical character.

Einstein’s work introduced an additional conceptual transformation by overturning Isaac Newton’s classical conception of absolute time. According to relativity, there is no universal present shared identically by all observers. Measurements of time depend upon the observer’s state of motion and the surrounding gravitational field. Consequently, the concept of “now” cannot be regarded as universally identical throughout the cosmos.

For Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud, this scientific insight became the starting point for a broader philosophical meditation.

If every perception depends upon information arriving after a delay, do we encounter reality itself, or only an image that necessarily belongs to the past? To what extent is human knowledge always mediated rather than immediate?

These questions explain why some of his writings suggest that humanity may inhabit a world whose distant images survive long after the physical objects themselves have disappeared.

Nevertheless, philosophical reflection must be carefully distinguished from scientific conclusion.

Neither Einstein’s Theory of Relativity nor modern astrophysics suggests that the Earth has somehow ceased to exist while we continue living upon it. Such an interpretation extends beyond the boundaries of established science. Light reflected from nearby objects—including the Earth and the people around us—reaches our eyes within tiny fractions of a second. For all practical purposes, our everyday perception corresponds extremely closely to present reality.

Only on astronomical scales does the delay become sufficiently large for us to observe the distant universe as it existed years, centuries, or millions of years ago.

The relationship between Einstein and Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud may therefore be understood as complementary rather than identical.

Einstein established the scientific principle that information requires time to travel and that observation of distant celestial objects is necessarily observation of the past.

Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud transformed this scientific principle into a philosophical question concerning the nature of reality, consciousness, and human knowledge. His objective was not to reinterpret relativity as a physical theory, but to explore its implications for our understanding of existence and perception.

In conclusion, one may reasonably state that human beings exist and act in the present, while their knowledge of the distant universe is always mediated through signals originating in the past. The greater the distance separating the observer from the observed object, the further into history that observation extends. The night sky is therefore not merely a spectacle of shining stars, but an immense historical archive through which the universe gradually reveals its own past.

Dr. Hassan Othman Dahab
University of Copenhagen

Source: The Concept of Time in the Thought of Dr. Mostafa Mahmoud