  McTaggart’s well-known argument (1908) that time is unreal applies equally to the unreality of (temporal) change it seems. McTaggart distinguished between two ways of attributing temporal characteristics to events. The \(A\)-series of events is given by the descriptions “past,” “present” and “future,” while the \(B\)-series is strictly in terms of the relational concepts “earlier,” “simultaneous” and “later.” Now the \(B\)-series is insufficient to define change, because \(B\)-series relations apply unchangingly if they apply at all; whatever is earlier than something is always earlier than it. Moreover, the \(B\)-series presupposes the \(A\)-series since if \(X\) precedes \(Y\) then there must be a time when \(X\) is past and \(Y\) present. This step in the argument is not at all absurd: the discovery of spacetime, the relativistic realisation of the \(B\)-series, has impelled many from Minkowski on to describe it as a “static” conception of time. A genuinely dynamic conception of change would thus need to have things coming into and going out of existence with the passage of time, whereas spacetime invites quantification over it all “at once” as it were.