I’m high on ambien and I have a mathematical physical theory
We live in a four dimensional world; three space dimensions and one time dimension, but I propose that time is in fact no more than another spatial dimension along which we are moving at a fixed rate. We cannot go back through time, only forward, we experience a constant acceleration along the 4th axis, and can only perceive the 3D world as cross sections of the greater 4D space.
Imagine a 2D plane with some square people on it, living square lives. To them, the world is flat and there is no third spatial dimension. They do experience a time dimension, but we can extrapolate what the time dimension looks like by imagining it as frames in a flip book, stacked one on top of the other. Each frame is a cross section of this 2D world, advancing a little through their two spatial dimensions per frame. Each frame, the square people perceive as a moment in time, but are unable to return down the stack to a previous one. Some force is pushing them through the third spatial dimension which they know as time. If we tracked their movements, it would look like the extrusions of a 3D printer, a 2D being creating a 3D projection of itself with each slice.
Time for 3D space is just the same; every frame is a full 3D rendering of our universe, one instant, stacked 90 degrees perpendicular to the other three. A sequence of 0 dimensional points defines a line, a sequence of parallel 1 dimensional lines defines a plane, a sequence of parallel 2 dimensional planes defines a space, and a sequence of parallel 3 dimensional spaces defines a hyperspace. We are 3D beings propelled through hyperspace like cartoons on a 3D flip book, like stop motion figures. Just as you can line up the 2D figures into a 3D snake one salami slice at a time, you can line up all of our 3D figures into a 4D hypersnake that stretches from the beginning of time to the end. Kurt Vonnegut figured this out with his concept of the Tralfamadorians, but his creatures existed simultaneously at all points in time, able to travel ana and kata (back and forth) through the 4th spatial dimension at will, experiencing all time at once. They’re not being pushed forward through time like we are.
I assume that the speed of time is constant, that we are being pushed along the 4th spatial dimension at the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters per second. Every second, we are traveling down the hypersnake that is our 4 dimensional extrusion at light speed, and if we laid out our snake end to end, each second would consist of 300 million meters of snake. That’s about 78% of the way to the moon, every single second.
Imagine if you would turn that acceleration 90 degrees, to steer yourself down any spatial dimension of your choosing; that’s how you’d travel through space at light speed, only it would feel like traveling through time. Trips across the solar system would take seconds or minutes, trips to other stars would take years, but it’s the best we can do. Of course, it would look bizarre from your perspective because suddenly you’re not going down the 4th spatial dimension of time anymore. Imagine if a 2D character, being propelled up through time at the speed of light, changed course to go parallel to his physical plane instead. Imagine if you took the flip book, turned it 90 degrees, and started slicing it into frames across the grain of the previous ones; you’re making new cross sections of the 3D space of the flip book, and assuming you can get all the strands of previous frames to hold together as one new frame, you’d be seeing traveling up this new dimension at the speed of light, experiencing it as time, passing through and around the 2D cross sections of the snakes of everyone else who is continuing to travel through time normally.
I don’t think I’m explaining this well; take a flip book and draw a ball bounding on it, back and forth across the page. Each frame is just a moment in time, but if you stack all the frames together and just focused on the ball, it would become a snake, swishing back and forth through space as it rises from the bottom of the flip book to the top. That snake exists independently of the animation; whether the ball is being propelled through time or not, the snake exists. If you took this flip book and turned it 90 degrees, the snake still exists, but now it is on its side instead of standing up and down. If you took a sideways cross section of it from this angle, you might find multiple pieces of the ball at different places, wherever the ball returned to the same point in space at a different time. Traveling through a spatial dimension like it was time would show us a bizarre world where the future is to the left, the past is to the right, and the present stretches back and forth in both directions parallel to it. You could time travel by moving into the past or present, and then turning 90 degrees so you can continue down your original time dimension. Of course, your movement through time would be projected as a snake millions of maters long that exists for an instant in real time and then vanishes.
I can visualize what I’m talking about, but I can’t animate to save my life, so I don’t know if anyone understands this at all or if I sound like a stark raving lunatic. I have no method of traveling through time or space, I am simply extrapolating what it would look like to a traveler and to an outside observer. Imagine 3D printing a flip book into a solid mass with clear acrylic for the background and colored acrylic for the objects; you’d be able to see the snakes going up. Turn it on its side and start taking cross sections of the snakes instead; they undulate in and out of existence, in multiple places at once, as the snake moved through 2D space and projected itself through 3D time. Extrapolate up an extra dimension and you can figure out how time travel would look like
