Objection! Assuming facts not in evidence.
Oh, hey, I remember coming up with something similar: spime! A dimension mainly used for faster-than-light travel (you enter spime and wait millions of miles while going a few minutes forward, then you return to normal space).
It’s rather morbid to think that we’re “ancient Jewish men and women sitting around” imagining that we’re dead, and out children are dead, and their children are dead, and so on and so forth, completely lost and forgotten, not even dust but a scattering of atoms.
Although it does explain why sometimes we seem to bump up against something and we look down and nothing is there. And why cats are always staring off into corners and dogs howl at invisibilities.
Wait, are the cats and dogs of 730BCE also imagining our modern world?
No, it didn’t.
If you have to ask, it’s a step in the right direction .
Phil, is that you?
“I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. but how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D. 50, then why do we see A.D. 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?” Philip K. Dick
If enough of us “remember” the alternate ending to Big, will it come into existence?
Didn’t it?
This is the best answer I’ve gotten so far; perhaps Philip K Dick and I both came up with kind of the same idea.
Drugs will do that.
Especially if you see pink light.
Do not take the brown acid!
Bolding mine
Also, what?
Bolding mine
Also, what?
Someone certainly thinks so.
Isn’t that the ending of the last episode of St. Elsewhere?
Thank you.
The wave equation and the spacetime metric work just as well with three time dimensions and one space dimension.
Everybody say: wut?
If it helps, her narrative was accompanied by a diagram. Her world was an endless flat plane that only existed in one point of time, but it was also chaos, where the unstable environment changes the environment, instead of it changing through passage of time.
Maybe.
I think that you’d have to have a brain that exists in time and endures in space to fully grok that.
Well, you can be in my dream, if I can be in yours.
I said that!
I think the problem with understanding is a weird word choice. Does “Earth existed in space and moved through time, her world existed in time and moved through space” sound more clear?
Swapped dimensions isn’t a unique concept in SF. This trilogy comes to mind, for instance:
At the end of “Starmaker” (Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel), there’s a surprisingly sophisticated discussion about dimensions and time, as in this brief excerpt
In his maturity the Star Maker conceived many strange forms of time. For
instance, some of the later creations were designed with two or more
temporal dimensions, and the lives of the creatures were temporal
sequences in one or other dimension of the temporal “area” or “volume.”
These beings experienced their cosmos in a very odd manner. Living for a
brief period along one dimension, each perceived at every moment of its
life a simultaneous vista which, though of course fragmentary and
obscure, was actually a view of a whole unique “transverse” cosmical
evolution in the other dimension. In some cases a creature had an active
life in every temporal dimension of the cosmos. The divine skill which
arranged the whole temporal “volume” in such a manner that all the
infinite spontaneous acts of all the creatures should fit together to
produce a coherent system of transverse evolutions far surpassed even
the ingenuity of the earlier experiment in “pre-established harmony.”In other creations a creature was given only one life, but this was a
“zig-zag line,” alternating from one temporal dimension to another
according to the quality of the choices that the creature made. Strong
or moral choices led in one temporal direction, weak or immoral choices
in another.In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with
several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating
many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos.
Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many
creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and
the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of
distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal
sequence in this cosmos.