Vassily Maximov, "Everything is in the past" (1889)

Humans have recorded the past since ancient times, and to some extent, one of the defining characteristics of human beings is that they are able to record the past, recall it, remember it and confront it with the current state of affairs, thus enabling them to plan accordingly for the future, and to theorise about it as well.

In philosophy

According to presentism, the past does not strictly exist; however, the methods of all sciences study the world's past, through the process of evaluating evidence.

A visualisation of the past light cone (at bottom), the present, and the future light cone in 2D space.

In physics

In classical physics the past is just a half of the timeline. In special relativity the past is considered as absolute past or the past cone. In Earth's scale the difference between "classical" and "relativist" past is less than 0.05 s, so it can be neglected in most cases.

In other fields

The past is the object of such fields as history, archaeology, archaeoastronomy, chronology, geology, (historical geology), historical linguistics, law, paleontology, paleobotany, paleoethnobotany, palaeogeography, paleoclimatology, and cosmology.

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See also

• Antiquarian
• Fossil
• Memory
• Past tense
• Retro

References

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