ProetryPlace Blog 73: An Invitation to the Fourth Dimension
Today dear friends, readers and curiosity seekers, I invite you to explore with me the fourth dimension, the puzzling and problematic dimension our geometries cannot depict, the dimension of time.
It sounds a bit exotic, mysterious, spooky even, like Serling’s Twilight Zone, yet nothing is more common in human experience. Three dimensions are easy for our minds to handle, no matter how irregular the shape. From giant boulders to spider webs, we understand these dimensions, because we can touch them, hold them, behold them. Even extrapolated to the vast dimensions of outer space reaching into an unimaginable infinity, we are comfortable with the concept of three dimensions.
But time, the fourth dimension—what is time? We cannot feel or see time. We cannot influence time, roll it down a hill, toss it in the air, shape it on an anvil. Time has no mass, no charge nor other physical property measurable by human means by which we might define it. (I neglect here relativistic concepts of space-time warping. I am confused enough without that.)
“What about clocks!” you shout out with a flash of brilliant insight.
Yes, the clock on the wall or in our smart phone ticks or hums with more or less precise regularity, measuring the time of day in tiny fractions. The radio-isotope in some distant laboratory decays, molecule by molecule, through the centuries, with more precise regularity, setting the global standard for the measurement of time. But these clocks only measure time in arbitrary units. They do not define this most enigmatic concept, they do not answer the question, “What is time?”
However, in physics where many quantities require a measurement of time (e.g. velocity and acceleration), time is defined as what the clock measures. Practical, but hardly a satisfying definition. Britannica.com offers this: “Time; a measured or measurable period, a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions.” thus defining time by what it is not and making time at once a chunk of some larger entity and the whole of that entity, the continuum. (Continua are interesting concepts in themselves, that I will neglect for now.)
Wikipedia.com notes that defining time in a manner without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Philosophers through the millennia of human history have attempted to define time in terms of human experience in which all living things are born, age and die. (Some religions extend death into an infinite future that holds rebirth or resurrection in some form.). We move through time or time flows around us. Time moves from a past with events we can recall but not relive, through the now into a future that we cannot recall or foretell. Britannica.com poses this arresting question: Do future events pop up into existence as the present moves into the future from the past. Were they waiting there in the future, all along?
My take on time includes these concepts: Time is a one way street. We cannot travel back in time. We can only travel forward, into the future, into the abyss.
and, poetically
inexorably
like lava flowing
creeping, engulfing, killing
time happens
The least fathomable aspect of time in human experience is the present. In fact, I assert that there is no present except as a transition point, a vanishingly small moment, between the known past into the unknowable future. Each breath we take is in the past once breathed, each word we speak is in the past, not to be retracted, each action or non-action is history, never to be recovered, always behind us in the mysterious medium we call time. Thus there is no present and, for some, no future. Could the future be an illusion also?
I have skimmed a few quotes about time from the internet (Goodreads lists over 3400). Each one, I think, is worth some moments of your time to contemplate.
Lao-Tsu: “Time is a created thing.”
G. Chaucer: “Time and tide wait for no man.”
N. Hawthorne: “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”
Einstein: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
T. Carlyle: “One life—a little gleam of time between two eternities.”
H. D. Thoreau: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishin in.”
R. Bean: “Time will pass and seasons will come and go.”
Buddha: “The trouble is, you think you have time.”
Dr. Seuss: “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness, how the time has flown. How did it get so late so soon?”
Anon: “ Time flies like an arrow. Love flies like a sparrow. Fruit flies like bananas.”
Have a good day.
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