The conception of time influences an individual's thinking about the past and history in different ways. People study history making reference to the time when some events or activities took place. There cannot be history without time. According to Schlabach (2016), time and history act as the primary units of the study of history. The study of history helps in learning about past events and how they relate to the present individual behaviors or world happenings.
Einstein in his dream demonstrated how people in the past thought about history differently that the present people. In one of the dreams, Einstein tried to associate time with the flow of water. He explains a phenomenon when a person gets carried back to the past and starts seeing how things unfolded to the present. The dream was dated back on April 16, 1905, and demonstrates how 1979 European Union came into existence. According to Lightman (1993, pp. 6-9), the woman shown in the Einstein’s dream happened to know what would happen in the future but remained invisible because a single attempt to change the future would destroy the upcoming generation. However, the concept of time influences people’s minds to think that if people in the past acted differently, the history we learn about would be non-existence.
There cannot be history without record (Schlabach, 2016). The individual's conception of time creates a lot of dilemmas as learners demand to know what happened before a written historical event. Einstein had a dream where he thought of people living just for a single day. According to the dream, nobody lives to witness changes happening in the seasons. Likewise, historians only record events that happened at a particular time in the past. Events happening at the time of recording cannot be shown in history because there is a lack of evidence of time that they ever happened. In the Einstein’s dream, a person born in December 1905 cannot narrate happenings of the past years (Lightman, 1993). However, the individual can only assume what happened during the past time. The concept of time leads to people guessing about past events.
References
Lightman, A. (1993). Einstein’s dreams. New York: Patheon Books
Schlabach, G. W. (2016). A sense of history: Some components. Available at
GeraldSchlabach.Net
