Any time someone mentions anyons, I always think of Annyong. Heh.
Stranger
I always liked this explanation:
Imagining the 10th Dimension. I’m not entirely sure how accurate it is, but it makes sense (for as far as I was able to follow it before my head asploded.)
NO NO NO NO NO!
I’ve debunked that steaming pile over and over, and on this very message board, even! It’s shaky by the 4th dimension, and absolute crap beyond that. Burn that bookmark and never look back.
Aw, poop. So much for String Theory for Dummies, then. 
If you really want to get a feel for the fourth dimension, at least, there’s a new movie that is accurate. In fact, I just reviewed it yesterday.
Wow, thanks for posting that. Truly an epiphany. Finally an internet site about ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ that actually delivers the goods. Things make (a lot more) sense to me now.
ETA: Can Zombies exist if time is a spatial dimension?
Well think of a movie film roll with each frame a point in time. Movie slides are effectively two dimensional, sure there’s a little thickness but it doesn’t do much. Anyway when the projector plays the film it moves from slide to slide focusing on one frame at a time as it plays the movie and gives rise to animated images, which is analogies to what we think of as the “present”, however all slides exist at once frozen in the film reel, the past and future of space-time.
A person in this movie could point up, down, left or right, but they couldn’t turn say 90 degrees relative to the film strip, which means they could never point at another film strip in a different “time” of the film only at things in their personal slide.
OTOH, like the sphere in Flatland or the Tralfamadore from Slaughterhouse Five, you would see your entire life at once. And being able to see the whole thing at once, you could change it and instantly see how those changes would affect your entire life.
Time is different from a spatial dimension in a couple of fundamental ways through. Most importantly, it’s one way. You can go backwards along the x, y and z axis, but not backwards along the time (t) axis.
Time as a spatial dimension also presumes that each “moment” in time physically goes somewhere, sort of like a frame in a movie. We currently perceive reality essentially as a snapshop of the present with distorted memories of previous frames and vague predictive images of future frames.
So if you could perceive time as a spatial dimension, maybel you would perceive the past, present and future as clearly as what you are seeing right now.
Assuming you could also travel along the t axis, I would imagine it would be like rolling a projector in reverse. You go back to some previous x,y,z and t position and everything else is where it was at the point in time. Then you have the option of doing something different. This is a pretty big assumption though. I mean we can perceive the z dimension well enough, but physics (ie gravity) prevents us from levitating above the earth unaided.
I will now go back in time and post my similar theory a few minutes earlier.
The fact that you are thinking about this is proof that you already do perceive time in the fourth dimension. movement and thought progression are resultants of the fourth dimension.
think of dimensions like this: if I was describing to you my position on the earth so that you could meet me I would have to tell you four things, My exact longitude, latitude, distance above ground and a specific time. If I were to tell you only three of those you would either be endlessly wandering in a line around the earth looking for me or arrive at the wrong time, thus missing our meeting.
Raiko, you’re missing the essential aspect of spatial dimensions in your description, which is that points on a spatial axis are always accessible. I can go from (x,y,z) = London, England to (x,y,z) = New York City, NY and then I can go back to (x,y,z) = London again. Trajectories in spatial dimensions can change and even reverse direction. Yes, time is a dimension in the sense of specifying spacetime coordinates, but the OP’s question was about the consequences of time as a spatial dimension.
It’s okay I actually posted it next week, but I got the projector guy to splice that frame in earlier.
You’re right I didn’t get to say everything I wanted in that post, my computer was typing like a letter a minute at the time so I cut it short and went to bed.
There is a flaw in your logic of concluding that Time is not a spatial dimension. first of all you are deducing this based on your perception of time as separate from the universe and the other three dimensions. Time and space are inherently linked in fact we are seeing starlight that is billions of years old and sunlight from eight minutes (or seconds I cant remember which off the top of my head) ago. you can effectively travel into the future by approaching the speed of light so, as you can see time is different depending on your location in space. In fact the movement of time in our dimension is only an illusion as all time is simultaneous. Time is indeed a spatial dimension as are all diensions spatial whether or not we can grasp the physics and geometry at work.
In order for us to see time as the OP was suggesting we would have to move up to a higher fifth dimension. from that vantage point it would be quite similar to observing three dimensional renderings. in our dimension. we would see the entirety of time laid out at once and when you look at a desk (as someone earlier stated) not only would you see every past and future owner of that desk but every past and future potential owner as the several different realities would be apparent to you simultaneously. Also you would see simultaneously every permutation of every action that happened in that spacetime. in other words if one of the desks owners had once flipped a coin at that desk which landed on heads then you would see that and you would also see the exact same person who flipped a coin which landed on tails. this may seem daunting to us but fifth dimensional beings would most likely be able to perceive this without trouble. Since there are eleven dimensions (no I didn’t pull that number out of my arse it has to do with M-theory which is a different conversation altogether) we can scarcely speculate at what beings of the eleventh perceive if indeed there are any beings that can survive that many dimensionalities.
Mind you, what I’m telling you is solely based upon how we understand time today, three hundred years ago we understood that the sun revolved around the earth, a few decades ago we understood that earth was the only planet in our solar system with water, imagine what we’ll understand about our universe tomorrow!
Picture a bunch of computer rendered 3-D objects set against a 3-D grid. Now picture those objects slowly moving randomly around that space. Boom! You are perceiving time.
Now, picture somehow being able to comprehend all that at once. It might be something like trails, but as if those trails projected out on some totally different axis that isn’t included in your drawing.
You don’t get a mental image that you could draw, but I think you get a good idea of what perceiving it would be like.
this does not address the question in this forum nor did I think to start a separate forum unless more people than I anticipated find advanced particle physics engrossing. I just thought it was an interesting concept to bring forward.
in addition to travelling into the future (by approaching the speed of light so that relitivistically time in your local area is moving at half that of outside time) it may also be possible to send things, at least information backwards through what we perceive as time through the use of tachyons. Tachyons are a recent buzzword that has been given some unfair incredulity because of its depiction in science fiction.
In reality tachyons, if they exist, behave according to a well known relativistic equation ( E=m*[1-v/c2]-1/2) this prevents all quantum particles with a non-zero mass (m>0) from reaching the speed of light (v<c) and allows zero mass particles (m=0) to travel at the speed of light (v=c) this group includes photons and bradyons. this is all fine and good so long as the energy stays within normal mathematical range but what if E were imaginary (that is a number which is the square root of a negative). If E were imaginary and m were real number then this partical not only could move faster than light, by the laws of physics it would have to. this is because this equation produces the curious effect that as its energy decreases its velocity increases until it reaches 0 and the particle is said to be “transcendant” (moving infinitely fast) the particle would never slow to normal speed as it would have to have infinite energy to pass the speed of light in the opposite direction (light is like a hallway with a locked door on both sides- it takes infinite energy to cross the threshold from either end and zero mass to travel within that hallway)
Moving faster than the speed of light means that relative to us the tachyons would appear to move backwards through time violating causality. since these particles behave much like very fast protons if we could generate them artificially it would be very possible to send simple messages backwards through time as organized impulses of superluminary particles.