Is Marie Curie Still Real? The Fight Over What Exists
A Photo of a Hero: Does She Exist?
You flip open a biography and stop at a picture of Marie Curie (1867–1934), the scientist who won two Nobel Prizes. You admire her brilliance. But Curie died decades ago. Does she exist right now? If you say no, you are leaning toward presentism, the view that only present things really exist. The past is gone. The future has not yet arrived. This deceptively simple idea has sparked centuries of argument, and it forces us to ask what is real and what is just a story.
Three Competing Pictures of Time
Presentism is one answer to an immense question: what exists, period? Eternalism says past, present, and future all exist equally. Think of a movie filmstrip: every frame is there at once, even though the projector shows only one frame at a time. According to eternalism, dinosaurs, you reading this sentence, and future Mars colonies are all part of a single four‑dimensional block — just located at different points. A third view, the growing block theory, says the past and present exist, but the future does not. Reality is like a book whose pages are written one by one; the past pages stay on the shelf, the present page is being ink‑pressed, and the future pages are blank. Presentism, by contrast, says only the current page exists, and when a new page arrives, the old one vanishes.
Presentists usually add two more ideas. First, what is present changes — now Curie is gone, now you are here, tomorrow someone else will be. Second, time genuinely passes. This makes presentism a version of the A‑theory of time, which says there is a real, moving “now” that separates past from future. The central fight is about what you can count in your inventory of reality. Presentists count only what is present; eternalists count everything; growing block theorists count everything except future things.
Why Presentism Feels So Obvious
For many philosophers, presentism wins by a knockout in the first round simply because it matches our everyday gut feeling. When you say “dinosaurs are extinct,” you don’t expect them to be lurking somewhere. The idea that past things exist sounds bizarre. Even some opponents admit this intuitive pull.
A classic argument presses further. Imagine a toothache from last month. If that past ache still existed, it would hurt — because a pain that exists is a pain that hurts. Since it doesn’t hurt anyone now, it must not exist. Now imagine a painful dentist appointment tomorrow. You worry about it; you try to avoid it. If the future pain already existed, why would you fear it any differently than a pain happening right now? Presentists say our attitudes make sense only if past pains are gone and future pains are not yet real.
There is also a plea for simplicity. Ockham’s razor warns us not to multiply things beyond necessity. Presentists count far fewer items than eternalists or growing block theorists — they get by with only one moment’s worth of objects. That quantitative parsimony sounds economical, but it’s controversial. Most philosophers think only qualitative parsimony (fewer kinds of thing) matters, and presentism doesn’t reduce kinds. Still, if you love a lean universe, presentism looks appealing.
When ‘Exist’ Gets Tricky: Definitions, Relations, and Truths about the Past
Trouble begins the moment you try to say exactly what presentism means. “Only present things exist.” That sounds clear, but critics break it into three readings: (1) Only present things exist now. That is boringly true — it says nothing about dinosaurs or Mars colonies. (2) Only present things have ever existed, exist now, or will ever exist. That seems false, because Marie Curie has existed. (3) Only present things exist in a special, “timeless” way. But critics argue this collapses back into (2). If presentism is either trivial or false, why take it seriously?
Presentists fight back. They say we must read the claim with a special quantifier — “for any thing (within time)” — and insist there are no non‑present things at all. So the statement “only present things have existed” is not false, because the domain contains only present entities. A past figure like Curie is not an entity that currently lacks presence; she simply no longer is. This reply is clever, but not everyone is persuaded.
A deeper worry is cross‑temporal relations. You admire Marie Curie. Admiration is a relation, and most people think a relation can hold only if both things exist. If Curie does not exist, how can you be related to her? Similarly, yesterday’s rain caused today’s flood; that’s a causal relation. Presentists have several moves: they can say you admire Curie’s properties (her perseverance, her insight) which exist now as ideas, or they can deny that relations require both relata to exist, or they can treat “admiring Curie” as a one‑place property of you. None of these is easy.
The problem sharpens when we talk about truth. “Curie discovered radium” is true, but what makes it true? If only present things exist, there is no Curie, no radium‑discovery event to point to. This is the truth‑maker objection. Some presentists add Lucretian properties — the whole world now has the property having contained a person who discovered radium. Others, called ersatz presentists, say an abstract timeline exists outside ordinary time, and a past time‑slice represents how things were. Critics object: a truth about Curie should be made true by Curie herself, not by a strange present property that “points beyond” itself. That feels suspicious, like a note that says “I was a real discovery” without the real thing.
A radical reply says stop hunting for truth‑makers. Just accept that “it was the case that” is a primitive operator, the way “not” or “and” is. This nefarious strategy avoids adding spooky present entities, but it leaves many philosophers unsatisfied. And even if truth‑making is solved, a related puzzle about spans of time remains: “There have been seven English kings named Edward” cannot be paraphrased with simple “was” operators because the kings were not all on the throne at once. Presentists either try to nest operators infinitely or introduce a special “span” operator, and each path runs into trouble.
Can Time Flow? And Einstein’s Surprise
Presentism says time passes, and that what is present changes. But if only the present moment exists, what makes it true that things change? Ersatz presentists can answer by pointing to their abstract timeline: one ersatz time represents how things were, another how they are, and the difference accounts for change. Yet now a new question nags: what guarantees that the abstract times reflect the real past, rather than being a frozen concrete moment plus a fiction? The presentist needs a bridge to the past that does not rely on past things, and that is hard to build.
The most thunderous objection comes from physics. Special relativity (STR) suggests there is no single, universal “now” that slices the universe into past and future for everyone. What counts as simultaneous depends on your motion. If two observers move relative to each other, they might disagree about which events are present. Presentism requires an absolute present — a shared, moment‑by‑moment reality for the whole cosmos. Relativity seems to rob presentism of that. As the philosopher Simon Saunders put it, if only the present is real, then “special relativity is radically deficient as a description of reality.”
Presentists can try to undermine relativity by adopting a different interpretation, such as a neo‑Lorentzian view that posits a hidden absolute frame. But that interpretation must explain why every known material law secretly obeys Lorentz invariance — a massive coincidence. Most philosophers and physicists think that’s too high a price. Another route, counterargument, would claim that our metaphysical reasons for presentism outweigh empirical physics, but almost no one finds that convincing. So relativity remains a forceful challenge.
Why This Matters for You
The debate isn’t just for physics labs. What you believe about time shapes how you feel about your own past and future. If only the present is real, then embarrassing mistakes from last year are genuinely gone — they do not exist anywhere in the block of reality. That might make you lighter. But then what is a promise to a friend for next week? The future isn’t there, so you cannot point to anything real when you say, “I will meet you Tuesday.” Yet we live as though the future matters. And when you look at that photo of Marie Curie, you are making a claim about a woman you believe was once as real as you are now. Presentism says that belief is deep‑seated, but making it precise forces you to wrestle with the fabric of existence.
Think about it
- If you could travel to the past and shake Marie Curie’s hand, would that prove she still exists? Or might the trip merely show a perfect replica of a world that no longer exists?
- If you are terrified of a dentist appointment next month even though the pain doesn’t exist yet, what does that fear tell you about the reality of the future?
- If two observers moving through space can disagree about what is happening “now,” does the idea of a single, shared present still make sense?
