# Time is not a dimension. There is no time **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 11, 2008, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138 "2008-11-11T02:10:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/81 "2008-11-13T04:00:57Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Eh, three one-dimensional variables or one three-dimensional variable, whatever. It’s just semantic quibbling; it doesn’t change what I was saying. (In a way, this whole thread is just semantic quibbling, perhaps taken by some to have stronger consequences than semantic quibbling can actually justify) I suppose so. “Time” is a purely semantic construct. So, my denial of it’s existence is a semantic argument. You run into trouble from a quantum physics standpoint when you begin thinking that time is real and discover it’s fundamentally incompatible with observed phenomena like quantum entanglement. Feynman himself was a proponent of retrocausality. > [@](#): > > How do you describe the difference between “John ate dinner an hour before he went to bed, and then went to the bathroom 15 minutes later” and “John went to bed two hours before he went to the bathroom, and then ate dinner ten minutes later” without involving (explicitly or implicitly) a dimension of time? All I would have to do is describe the location of the specific particles that make up John. The food particles in his stomach would be in a specific chemical state and location consistent with your statement as would the state and location of the particles in his bladder. These would be different in either case. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/82 "2008-11-13T04:02:45Z")
(If you want to point out that we can adopt the perspective that there’s no such thing as time, fine. Certainly, we could take omphalosian ideas (aka, Last Thursday-ism) that much further. But if you want to do this while simultaneously maintaining that there is, clearly, indisputably, such a thing as three-dimensional space, you are doing something very odd, because the things which motivate us to talk of space are the same kinds of things as the things which motivate us to talk of time) ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/83 "2008-11-13T04:04:04Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > All I would have to do is describe the location of the specific particles that make up John. The location of those particles before he eats dinner or after he eats dinner? Also, I do not see how retrocausality negates the existence of a time dimension; indeed, discussion of such things would generally seem to involve concepts of “before” and “after”. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/84 "2008-11-13T04:04:25Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Put it another way: what more can the ordinary English word “motion” mean than “those things which are routinely described in the English language as ‘motion’”? And surely you are not denying that there _are_ phenomena routinely described by English speakers as “motion”? Phenomena of various kinds which serve as the archetypes of “motion”. You’ve provided a circular definition. You can’t describe something meaningfully in its own terms. > [@](#): > > Now, the nature of these phenomena may be different from what we thought, but that doesn’t make the word whose meaning consists of describing them suddenly turn semantically void. It still describes them, whatever they are. Perhaps ancient man thought water was a primitive, indivisible substance; then, it was discovered it could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The response wasn’t “Oh, wow, turns out water doesn’t exist”. The response was “Oh, so _that_’s the true nature of water. Interesting…”. Hydrogen and oxygen have different properties when they are bonded and when they are not bonded. The term “water” has meaning because it describes this. Time doesn’t describe anything. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/85 "2008-11-13T04:05:37Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > You’ve provided a circular definition. You can’t describe something meaningfully in its own terms. You bootstrap the definition up by looking at what English speakers use the word “motion” to describe. That is, after all, how we all learnt to speak this language. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/86 "2008-11-13T04:07:19Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > Why do you throw “how much” in there? Just because it’s meaningless in terms of time doesn’t mean it won’t apply in other circumstances, i.e. three marbles, four marbles. “Before” and “after?” Yep. Meaningless. > > It’s still not time, it’s position. All the galaxies, all the stars, all the planets, the film, the frame in the film, the camera, and the screen are in different spatial coordinates from one frame to another. Describe the position accurately and you have already perfectly described what you refer to as “time.” There is no reason to define it in terms of time. Doing so is redundant. Can things like momentum and spin be described in purely positional terms? You need time to describe them. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/87 "2008-11-13T04:07:23Z")
Suppose I were to say “There is no such thing as distance; only frozen slices of a single Planck-length-sized unit cube”. What would the retort be? I presume it would be something like “Sure, but you also need to describe how those slices relate to each other. One way of arranging them would be different from another. And what we mean by distance, angle, position, etc., is found in the details of this arrangement”. Well, so it would be with time, then… I don’t understand. Is there something more to your argument then “We can take snapshots of the state of the universe at any given instant. Also, I’ve heard something about time being quantized/discrete… This all suggests to me that we should just look at each snapshot individually and say there is no structure relating them”? ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/88 "2008-11-13T04:21:33Z")
I could maintain that nothing exists except the phenomena I am experiencing right here and right now. Everything else is an illusion. Sure, it _looks_ like there are planets far far away, but that’s just light waves in my immediate vicinity giving that illusion. Same as it _seems_ like I have memories and other evidence of the past, but we needn’t posit an actual past to give them substance; all that historical information is contained in the description of the present-day configuration of the universe, which happens to be placed in such a way as to suggest but not actually demand such a past. To describe the entirety of the universe is just to describe the phenomena I am experiencing right here and right now. There exists nothing but a million frozen, tiny slices of these. Indeed, we could go whole hog with it and say, the experience-slices which exist are not just the ones which mesh with my current ideas about the past and the elsewhere, but, in fact, there exists an experience-slice for every possible configuration of the universe. There exist ones where I’m in Lava World and Flatworld and so on… And there is no further structure connecting them! No “before” or “to the left of” or “as a result of”. Nope, there’s nothing but pure possibilities, so that, Library of Babel style, actually, there’s hardly anything nontrivial we could categorically say about the physical world. And you _could_ do that, if you wanted to. You could do that for all kinds of things. But you only want to do this sort of thing for time, and not space and not anything else, and that is odd to me. You also seem to think the Planck time is important somehow, but I don’t see how your argument actually relies on it. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/89 "2008-11-13T04:24:12Z")
Alright, I’ll shut up for a bit. But I expect responses to each and every one of those posts! 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/90 "2008-11-13T04:33:03Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I don’t think I get this – how does the notion of multiple universes even enter the discussion? I can’t see any ‘branching’, i.e. the possibility of multiple distinct outcomes, anywhere. You’ve got two observers who, depending on their relative motion, experience distinct notions of simultaneity. They clearly inhabit the same universe; you can show that by making them touch in the moment they make their observations. They are both in different universes which are simply touching at a given point. In one universe the fleet has been launched. In another it hasn’t. The two people are touching and their respective slices of planck intersect at this point. This is why I said in my OP that I can communicate with my future selves. All the universes that contain a possible version of me, Scylla, intersect. > [@](#): > > In any case, in your view as well as in one without timesclices, to precisely pinpoint any event, you need four numbers – length, width, height, and time in the conventional picture, and length, width, height, and ‘timeslice-index’ in your picture; without the timeslice-index number, the event would not be uniquely identified. Not true. As has been pointed out, if I describe the location of every particle in the universe precisely I have also described what you call the 'time." > [@](#): > > What you end up with is still a four-dimensional spacetime, albeit, in the case of your model, one that appears inconsistent with relativity (another way to see this is that it appears your model can’t account for proper time, i.e. the dependence of the time a clock shows on its motion Again, no. No fourth dimension necessary. > [@](#): > > – take the twin paradox; what did the older twin do, hop through the timeslices faster than his brother? Has the younger twin gone through less timeslices? If so, were there then timeslices that contained the older, but not the younger brother?). You have a distinct person in each timeslice for each person. They exist as whole universes. So, in the first universe you have two distinct entities who are virtually identical. In the final universe. You have two distinct entities who are not identical. The “older twins” planck slices all intersect together as do the “younger” ones. They also respectively intersect at those locations where they are together. Picture it this way. take two tape measures, identical. Lay them side to side touching. All the numbers match up, right? Picture each inch marker as “time.” For the first two feet they run side to side and match up perfectly. Now bend one tape measure away from the other for a distance and then bend it back towards the other until they intersect. The numbers no longer match up. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/91 "2008-11-13T04:34:16Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > (To put it another way: You invoked the Planck time earlier. But if there is no such thing as “how much before/how much after”, then what does the Planck time mean? If there’s no ability to speak meaningfully about temporal intervals and their sizes, then what are we doing when we say the Planck time is so-and-so many seconds?) Planck time is simply the minimum seperation between universes. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/92 "2008-11-13T04:36:24Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > (If you want to point out that we can adopt the perspective that there’s no such thing as time, fine. Certainly, we could take omphalosian ideas (aka, Last Thursday-ism) that much further. But if you want to do this while simultaneously maintaining that there is, clearly, indisputably, such a thing as three-dimensional space, you are doing something very odd, because the things which motivate us to talk of space are the same kinds of things as the things which motivate us to talk of time) You’re beginning to get it. There is no time, because it is not separate from space. Space **is**. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/93 "2008-11-13T04:37:41Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > Can things like momentum and spin be described in purely positional terms? You need time to describe them. Nope. Energy describes those. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/94 "2008-11-13T04:38:36Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > Planck time is simply the minimum seperation between universes. Minimum in what sense? Does it make sense to say “Universe A is closer to universe B than universe C is to universe D?”. If so, it would appear to make sense to discuss a notion of distance between universes which corresponds to what we would normally think of as temporal distance. And if one can do that, how is there not a dimension of time? (Sorry, I know I said I’d be quiet and let you respond for a while…) ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/95 "2008-11-13T04:55:10Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Suppose I were to say “There is no such thing as distance; only frozen slices of a single Planck-length-sized unit cube”. What would the retort be? I would say that is an intrinsically nonsensical statement. The concept of “cube” doesn’t exist without distance. Planck time exists without time. It is simply the minimum distance separating universes. > [@](#): > > I presume it would be something like “Sure, but you also need to describe how those slices relate to each other. One way of arranging them would be different from another. And what we mean by distance, angle, position, etc., is found in the details of this arrangement”. Well, so it would be with time, then… No. I can describe every element of time without distance. You can’t reduce it further than that. > [@](#): > > I don’t understand. Is there something more to your argument then “We can take snapshots of the state of the universe at any given instant. Also, I’ve heard something about time being quantized/discrete… This all suggests to me that we should just look at each snapshot individually and say there is no structure relating them”? If we’re describing it in snaphsots, it’s like this: Not only is there a snapshot of the state of the universe at all given instances, but there is a snapshot of all possible universes at all possible instances. All those snapshots exist simultaneously. Many of them are connected and many of them intersect at points sharing the same information. The entire collection represents the multiverse. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/96 "2008-11-13T05:06:09Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > I would say that is an intrinsically nonsensical statement. The concept of “cube” doesn’t exist without distance. Planck time exists without time. It is simply the minimum distance separating universes. Minimum distance in what sense? It’s not a spatial distance, is it? I mean, one Planck time ago isn’t somewhere to my right or to my left or up or down, is it? This distance is along a different axis, right? A temporal one, so we can say of two universes that the distance between them is, e.g., five seconds? This would make time meaningful to my eyes. When giving a full description of a possible universe, presumably, you would want something like “At position X = 30 miles, Y = 90 miles, Z = 49 miles, we have a hydrogen atom. At the same X and Y coordinates but one mile up in the Z direction, we have…”, but not something like “At position X = 30 miles, Y = 90 miles, Z = 49 miles, at time 35829523562465 seconds, we have a hydrogen atom. At the same X, Y, Z coordinates but one second later, we have…”. But why this particular selection of coordinates? Why not be even more reductionist? Let us argue that there are only 2 spatial dimensions. A full description of a possible universe gives the state at every X and Y coordinate, period. There are all kinds of possible 2-dimensional universes, and what we think of as depth is just the distance separating such universes. It might look to us like the universe is truly spatially 3-dimensional, but this is just an illusion which we should learn to let go. No, wait, actually, there’s only one spatial dimension. We think of there being such things as height and depth, not to mention time, but these are just distances separating possible one-dimensional universes. No, wait, … You see? We can take any axis out of the picture if we so choose. You haven’t pointed out anything special about time that doesn’t apply equally well to space, or any other coordinate, whether discrete, continuous, or what have you. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 9:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/97 "2008-11-13T09:39:21Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Minimum distance in what sense? The universe is digital. The plank is a pixel. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/98 "2008-11-13T10:14:50Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > You run into trouble from a quantum physics standpoint when you begin thinking that time is real and discover it’s fundamentally incompatible with observed phenomena like quantum entanglement. Feynman himself was a proponent of retrocausality. Time is perfectly compatible with entanglement, and it’s even explicitly necessary for a retrocausal interpretation of quantum mechanics (which hinges on the notion of ‘retarded’ and ‘advanced’ potentials, both terms that have no meaning without time). > [@Scylla](#): > > They are both in different universes which are simply touching at a given point. In one universe the fleet has been launched. In another it hasn’t. The two people are touching and their respective slices of planck intersect at this point. But then you’d have to make infinitely many universes intersect in any given timeslice, since you have infinitely many possible reference frames and thus infinitely many potential observers. And the whole would still be a four-dimensional construct, in an analogue way to how you get a three-dimensional object by stacking two-dimensional planes. > [@](#): > > Not true. As has been pointed out, if I describe the location of every particle in the universe precisely I have also described what you call the 'time." Well, that description still would be four-dimensional, unless of course you want each 3D timeslice to be neatly stacked in a 3D metaspace, so that what we perceive to be one second later would be (at least) 13.7 billion lightyears to the left (or front or upwards or whatever). Then, however, your universes couldn’t intersect, being spatially separate. > [@](#): > > You have a distinct person in each timeslice for each person. They exist as whole universes. So, in the first universe you have two distinct entities who are virtually identical. In the final universe. You have two distinct entities who are not identical. Can you restate this without relying on ‘first’ and ‘final’ universe, or referring to any relation between the universes? According to your argumentation, three coordinates ought to suffice. > [@](#): > > Picture it this way. take two tape measures, identical. Lay them side to side touching. All the numbers match up, right? Picture each inch marker as “time.” For the first two feet they run side to side and match up perfectly. Now bend one tape measure away from the other for a distance and then bend it back towards the other until they intersect. The numbers no longer match up. However, you might have noticed that to do this, your previously one-dimensional system needed to have a dimension added to describe the bending of the tape measure; if you attempt the same in 3D space, you need a fourth dimension as well. Another view: a photon, to us, takes a time to travel from one point to another, which is given by its speed, c. However, to the photon, according to relativity, no time passes during its journey; thus, the photon should only exist in one timeslice. This is inconsistent with the behaviour according to any outside observer, according to which the photon inhabits several timeslices sequentially. Your model’s basic problem is that, no matter how often you try to assert otherwise, it essentially proposes a geometry with four space-like dimensions, while relativity requires one time-like and three space-like dimensions. ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/99 "2008-11-13T14:57:44Z")
Great, now describe an AC voltage without referencing time. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2008, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138/100 "2008-11-13T15:50:50Z")
> [@Scylla](#): > > Planck time exists without time. It is simply the minimum distance separating universes. Minimum distance? In what direction? Why can’t time be defined as progression through planck time sized universes? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/time-is-not-a-dimension-there-is-no-time/472138.md?page=6)