Time is not so objective as our intuition tells us; for example, Einstein broke the notion that an event happens at an absolute time. There is a school of thought today thattime is an illusion, based on how the mind experiences the universe. The link is to an article preview in Scientific American; a subscription is required to read the entire article.
Remember Flatland? Three-dimensional creatures could see the entire 2D plane; they could imagine it as a whole without experiencing it from a point within the plane. Imagine that some superdimensional creature could do the same thing, stepping outside of time, where they could see our entire world-line at once without having to experience it from a single point (called the present) where every other point would be seen as either past or future.
Our perception is that time flows. Maybe time is fixed and we flow through it.
It has to do with the concept of “dimension.” Dimensions are the numbers given in order to indicate where point A is in relation to point B.
With a one-dimensional figure (a line), you can give a single number (plus or minus) and indicate where the second point is.
With a two-dimensional figure, you need to give two numbers – length and height are the most common, but you can use other figures (angle and distance). But you need two numbers to find the point (though the numbers can be zero).
With three dimensions, you need three numbers. Again, length, height, and depth are the most common, but it can be other measurements.
Time is just another way of measuring, like length, width and depth. A four-dimensional world (which is what we live in) requires all four to be accurate. In our world, time isn’t always necessary (when computing the distance to Chicago, you don’t have to worry about it moving around), but it can be used. Similarly one- and two-dimensional directions can work in a four-dimensional world, since certain ones are not relevant to the measurement. But if you’re trying to tell the location of a fly flying around the room, you need four dimensions to locate it precisely.
There’s only one dimension in time because there is no concept of “perpendicular to time” (or “sideways to time”). “Right…NOW” is one “point” in time, just as “Right…THERE” is one “point” in three-dimensional space.
This is very much how I consider time. We can even consider how time might interact in a lower dimensionality. Let’s imagine two three dimensional scenarios.
The first one is 3 dimenions of which all are spatial. In it’s simplest form, we’d basically just have a cube and we can identify the location of an object with spatial measurements of height, width, and depth. Now let’s imagine 3 dimensions, except it’s 2 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. We’d represent the space with squares and we can stack them in order so we end up with the same total “space” of a cube.
Really, it seems to me that the only real difference in time is how internal observers experience it, that with time, one can only see the past. But externally, I’m not really sure there’d be any sort of meaningful difference because, just like looking at a flip, though those slices may be ordered, they don’t flow to the external observer. And really, who is to say that just because we observe time in a manner of flowing that that isn’t some limitation of our perception, our own inability to really experience time as it really is.
Many years earlier, Heinlein also wrote the short story Elsewhen. Unlike the later novel, the concept of traveling through the multiple time dimensions in Elsewhen was explored in some detail, not just used as a gimmick to hang story elements from.
In the late 70’s, fresh with my degree in Psychology, I applied for a job at the Max Planck Institute in Munich.
I didn’t get the job. (Don’t even think I was seriously in the running…)
However, while I was there I was privy to a study they were doing - and my own memory of the tidbit I learned is foggy (how appropriate), but as I understood it, there was a small group (20 or so?) of young people who had taken some bad drug that I believe they bought on the street, thinking it was some kind of LSD or whatever. It had a bad side affect. Each had later been admitted to the hospital for the exact same reason.
I hope I am remembering this correctly, but all of those people now were living in a kind of time warp - every one of them seemed to be exactly 10 minutes behind in time…whatever happened NOW was only fully aware to them ten minutes LATER.
The study was multi-level; how to cure them, of course - but also how the brain can be “fixed” to determine the time events are perceived to actually happen.
I have never found verification or proof of this story, and have no idea whether the effects of this drug eventually wore off or were cured/treated. This info came from a short conversation with a young researcher who worked there, and was just talking with me while I waited for my interview.
But the concept always interested me - how it was possible to alter time perception in the human brain. This raised all kinds of questions - and makes you wonder if the human brain has some kind of trigger than can be turned on or off, and if we all have some kind of automatic time-delay in our collective thought processes.
So while this might not lead to any great realization of time travel or time dimensions, it was interesting to contemplate that our brains might be holding us back from experiencing this effect.