Well it's an odd one to be sure WF, but in pursuit of getting it right I'll quote a few lines from the book I'm reading by Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist working in the field of quantum gravity and author of the book (from which I quote)
Reality is not what it seems.
Between the past and future of an event ( for example, between the past and future for you, where you are in the precise moment in which you are reading) there exists an 'intermediate zone', an 'extended present'; a zone that is neither past nor future. This is the discovery made with special relativity.
The duration of this 'intermediate zone' (the set of events at a space-like distance from a reference event), which is neither in your past or your future, is very small and depends on where an event takes place relative to you: the greater the distance from you, the longer the duration of the extended present. At the distance of a few meters...... the duration of what for you is the intermediate zone, neither past nor future, is.... a few nanoseconds. On the other side of the ocean....a thousandth of a second. But on the moon the duration of the expanded present is a few seconds, and n Mars it is a quarter of an hour. This means we can say that, on Mars, there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter of an hour during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future.
They are 'elsewhere'. We had never before been aware of this 'elsewhere' because next to us [it] is too brief; we are not quick enough to notice it. But it exists and it is real.
These are the words from the book WF, pretty much verbatim (with a little bit of the padding removed). They are accompanied by a diagram of a guy sitting in a chair reading a book, time on the vertical axis and distance on the horizontal (he sits in the middle, as it were, of the graphical field) Above his head is labelled 'future' and below him 'past' (he sits in a grey band which in a previous "space and time before Einstein" diagram had been labelled 'present', but in this one now contains two black cones/triangles extending out from him along the distance axis direction in both directions, labelled 'the extended present'. (Sorry this is a bit cumbersome as descriptions go.)
From all of this I read the implication that present is not a fixed duration event that occurs simultaneously no matter where you are in the universe, but rather is a variable duration event, the duration of which is entirely dependent upon the observers position and extending in magnitude with increasing distance? Am I reading this right, do you think?
(Edit; Another 'insight' which I have gained from my reading last night is that there is no such thing as 'space' {or more correctly space-time} in the way I understood it. I (like many others I suspect) had been thinking of space as a thing in which the 'fields' that carried electromagnetic waves etc existed in. This had always perplexed me. What exactly
were these fields? What were they made of? Now, from my reading, it transpires that space-time and these fields are one and the same thing. From Einstein's next theory, that of General Relatively, it transpires that space-time
is the gravitational field; there is no space in which they 'are situated' - it is the field/s themselves (I include the electromagnetic field here, correctly or otherwise) that are what we had previously referred to as space (space-time). And it is ripples and bending of this field that causes the effects that we see as gravity. This subtle distinction, that it is space itself that is the field and not a case of the field existing within space makes it much clearer to me (and also deals with the 'action at a distance' problem that Newton grappled with, but was never really able to reconcile in his theory of gravitation. Now there is no action at a distance because we have a medium we can quantify, express mathematically, that connects all bodies in our universe. There is no 'space with fields and matter within it' - only fields and particles; this is the sum of our universe.)
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