What is truth? There are many ways to define it. Let’s consider truth with respect to “duration” - that is to say the measure of truth/verifiability of a phenomenon/ state or object is a measure of its duration of existence through time. The more time it exists for the truer it is to the fundamental state of reality/ the universe.

There are many benefits of considering truth in this way. One would naturally think true things always exist and never change. Scientific Method uses duration of an observation in its “repeatability of experimental result” - the belief that things that are true or correct should be consistent through time and therefore can be measured repeatedly giving the same result.

However one could also reason that just because something didn’t exist for very long doesn’t negate the fact that it is true. Is it any less true - that is to say had a duration in time - then something that always exists? A fly might land on a specific part of a specific leaf at 10pm on a July day in 2020 and this doesn’t make it any less true that it happened than say the force of gravity which remains constant for much longer.

This is where verifiability comes in. To verify is to measure with consistency both of measurement and result. To verify that a fly landed on a leaf is easy on the day that it happens. But it is not repeatable. The same fly and the same location are probably not going to happen twice. However one can measure gravity at any moment and will get an acceleration of 9.8m-sqrd/s.

In a 10,000 years time it’s likely we will not be able to verify the fly landing on a leaf any better than we can verify what the daily life of a human was 10,000 years ago. Whilst it’s likely the force of gravity will be the same as it was 100,000 years ago or 1 million or a billion into the future.

So if we were to look for ultimate truth. Should we consider everything that we believe may exist eternally? Or should we focus on what we can measure at any instant - the present moment?