We live in the world we perceive.
Einstein's description (and it may not be the last word either) is not directly accessible to our senses, we certainly evolved to function in that universe, but we did not evolve the ability to understand it, or even perceive it.
Think of it this way. When we throw a baseball, we have complete control of its flight with our muscles and bones, balance of our bodies, and with the information received through our eyes and sense of touch and balance. But the motion of the ball involves things like gravitational forces, air resistance, things we weren't even aware of when we evolved the ability to throw stones and weapons. We simply don't need to know about the Laws of Motion or the mechanics of fluids
to hit a rabbit, or a catcher's mitt. But we nonetheless managed to evolve the means of doing so fairly accurately, and, what's much more important, we also evolved the ability to LEARN how to throw different things with sufficient accuracy for our own purposes: hand grenades, life preservers, Frisbees, pub darts, all without any knowledge of Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.
In fact, a mastery of classical dynamics and kinematics is actually quite useless when what we are trying to do is keep the ball out of the strike zone, but as close to it as possible, while simultaneously making it as hard as we can for the batter to predict its motion and hit it. Incidentally, he is using those same human skills we rely on to throw in order to swing his bat and get a hit. And that human reality is totally inaccessible to either Einstein or Newton. They knew nothing about baseball. They didn't have to.
There is a real world, and the perceptual world we live in. Both are equally valid, one is actually part of the other, but only one is experienced by us directly, and accessible to our actions. Try not to think of which world is more real, or more important. That is the wrong way to think about it. In fact, it can be quite misleading.
There is really only one world, we just can't see all of its parts at once. There may be a totality and continuity of space-time, just as there is to the surface of the earth, but each of us walks and sees a different landscape.
Space/Science » in reply to The present (not the xmas kind)
Einstein described the world as it is.
