Time

[ElfDude]

I was just reading an article at livescience.com (LINK). Imagine that... me being literate enough for that!

Anyway, this part caught my eye:

The fourth dimension

In physics, time is described as a dimension much like length, width, and height. When you travel from your house to the grocery store, you?re traveling through a direction in space, making headway in all the spatial dimensions?length, width and height. But you?re also traveling forward in time, the fourth dimension.

I would have to disagree about time being the fourth dimension. And I say that because time is the same in all dimensions. Now, let's see if I can make sense of that statement.

Let's pretend you're a two-dimensional creature... something like a stick figure that's living on a piece of paper (not a prefect description, but one that we can easily understand). And now let's say a three dimensional object enters your world... somebody pokes a pencil through that piece of paper on which you live. You'll be able to see it. But, you'll see it as a two dimensional object because you'll only be able to see that infinitely thin line of it that exists in your world. The rest of it will exist outside of your dimension and you will be unaware of it.

With that in mind... time passes just the same, whether you're in the first, second, or third dimension. Time just keeps on passing and doesn't "look" different to any of them.

So, I'd conclude that time is something along the lines of a non-dimensional property. That it is not the fourth dimension.

Am I thinking straight, or do some of you more-educated blokes need to set me straight?

[awip2062]

I remember reading about time being the fourth dimension when I was a kid and someone in the neighborhood turned me on to One Two Three...Infinity by Geroge Gamow. It did seem to make sense the way he described it. Perhaps I should re-read that chapter and see how he explains it again. Or, maybe Zep will chime in and make the mud clear as water to us!

[zepboy]

Well, I understand how and why many would be led to consider time to be a dimension along with height, legnth, and width. The primary reason is because of media influences such as The Twiligh Zone and other such shows. Nonetheless, Hollywood often has little grasp on reality, regardless of the subject.

Time, according to others (myself included) cannot be legitimately added to the dimension grouping. The primary reason for this is Time's nasty insistance to not being manipulatable. Time is perfectly linear, always marching toward infinity at a constant rate, beyond the reach of man. No effort is great enough to stop it or even slow it. We have been effective, to some degree, in presenting the image of slowing it down. For instance, the appearance of slowing the aging process of certain plant types and tissues. Nonetheless, it still ages. A perfect example would the Dolly the sheep who was cloned a while back. While it initially appeared that the clone was born and aging at a normal rate, it died prematurely, or so they thought. When autopsy results came back, they found that the regenerative properties of the clone share the same age signature at the DNA provider. What does this mean? It means that the clone sheep was the same age at birth as the DNA provider was at the time of the sample was taken. The aging process did not go back to the beginning as it does with conception. At conception, the new organism is at a biginning point. With cloning, the new organism begins at the point of age as the donor specimen.

Our commonly held demensions can be traversed at will, and even altered according to plan. No so with time.

So there. I can ged into the physics of how light and time relate, but that is another story!

[awip2062]

Oh! Stories! I love stories!



Go ahead!