A few nights ago, I was deep in the pit of a metalcore concert—bodies colliding, lights strobing, guitars tearing through the air like lightning. The energy was raw and primal, yet perfectly timed. The crowd wasn’t just reacting; it was breathing, moving, and erupting in sync. Everything was rhythm. Everything was time.

And as strange as it sounds, I found myself thinking about Einstein in the middle of all that glorious chaos.

As an engineer, I’ve always been drawn to the deep end of science — relativity, quantum mechanics, the kind of stuff that pulls the rug from under what we think is reality. And time, more than anything, has always fascinated me. Physicists have long debated its true nature. Einstein showed us that time isn’t fixed — that it bends under gravity, and stretches with velocity. Modern theories go further: some suggest that time doesn’t flow at all. That the passage of time is just how our consciousness stitches together a sequence of events. That is the fabric of the universe, past, present, and future all exist — static, like frames of a film reel.

It’s a mind-bending thought. That time — the very thing we live by — might be an illusion.

And yet, standing in that concert hall, my chest pounding with every double-kick, I couldn’t help but feel how real time was.

Metalcore doesn’t work without rhythm. The tension before a breakdown, the silence just before a guttural scream, the synchronized headbangs that crash like waves — they all rely on time. Not just as a backdrop, but as the very canvas. Even chaos has structure when it’s musical. And it made me realize something beautiful:

While physicists deconstruct time, musicians reconstruct it.

Music doesn’t ignore the illusion — it builds on it. It weaves emotion into the invisible threads of beat and tempo. It takes the intangible and makes it felt. It turns time into art.

From the outside, metalcore might seem like noise. But to those of us inside it — it’s an orchestra of precision. The riffs, the screams, the syncopation — they hit harder because they arrive exactly when they’re supposed to. Not a second before. Not a moment too late. And in that perfect strike of timing, we feel something transcendent. We lose ourselves. Or maybe we find ourselves in the rhythm.

It struck me, then, that maybe time is an illusion — but one that we need. One that gives meaning to motion, to sound, to memory. One that lets us experience a scream not as a static wave, but as something that rises, peaks, and fades — leaving behind an echo that only exists because we heard it in time.

As a physicist might say: the universe doesn’t care about time. But as a human, I do. We all do. Because even if the universe doesn’t play by the rules of clocks and calendars, our consciousness does. We experience. We change. We remember. And in that unfolding — in that rhythm — time becomes real.

So yes, time might be an illusion in the equations of relativity.

But in a metalcore concert, time is a force of nature.

It roars.
It builds.
It breaks.
It binds us together in shared rhythm.

And that night, as the final note hit and the crowd erupted in exhausted, euphoric applause, I realized:

Time may not be real in the strictest physical sense —
But it’s the most beautiful illusion we’ll ever scream into.