Why time as a fourth dimension should've been obvious
As you can see and as far as I know (which isn't very much), scientists and mathematicians have always taken the y axis of the Cartesian coordinate system as time and whatever else they're dealing with as the x axis In other words they were already considering time as a dimension just like spatial dimensions.
If you're not aware I think it was the mathematician d'alembert (1717 to 1783) who in 1754 first suggested this very idea. Descartes who started coordinate geometry lived between 1596 to 1650. The gap between the two is nearly a century, 65 years to be exact.
I guess there were other elements to the puzzle that needed to fall in place before Einstein (1879 to 1955) and Minkowski (1864 to 1909) realized that time was the fourth dimension.
Comments (24)
The problem here is that the charting technique puts time as distinct from all three dimensions of space. So if dimensionality is defined by spatial existence time would be better represented as non-dimensional, or the 0th dimension.
This is an over-simplistic description of why time is considered a dimension. I just happened on this essay by Ethan Siegel. He has a regular column - "Starts With a Bang" in "Forbes" magazine. I found it on "Real Clear Science." Check out RCS. It has some useless stuff, but a lot of it is really interesting. Here's a link to the Siegel article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/08/27/this-is-why-time-has-to-be-a-dimension/#74d98caf3646
And, afterward, from them, the preferred mode of time became to be the block universe of eternalism, in which past and future both exist, this opposing our naturally perceived notion of presentism, in which there are only nows passing by, with the future not yet and the past not kept, but, really, we can't tell presentism from eternalism, for their message to us is the same.
To survive as a theory, presentism needs a respite from Einstein’s seemingly unavoidable besieging relativity of simultaneity, since in presentism it is 'now' everywhere.
Guilty!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:brow: :chin:
Quoting PoeticUniverse
Yes. Continue please...
To all:
I was just wondering why it took 65 years for mathematicians to go from this:
To
Presentism does not just amount to the assertion that only present events or entities exist, but also that the present undergoes a dynamical ‘updating’, or exhibits a quality as of a fleeting swoosh, and this additional dynamical aspect is what threatens the substance of the debate between the presentist and an eternalist opponent.
In other words, what is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as to be or has been is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of What IS, and so it has no true ‘nonexistence’, for this as Nothing cannot be. There is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can't have an opposite to form a contrast class.
:ok:
Quoting PoeticUniverse
lost me there.
I received your SOS; you are lost somewhere in time, around 1912. Alert: Do not board the Titanic!
The link is synthetic, we link space and time with mathematics. How space and time are really related we haven't the foggiest idea. That's because we do not know what neither of these is, nor can we even describe what space or time is.
:ok:
What would this link be? I'd like to know if you're willing to teach.
I don't know enough physics to serve as an explainer. I couldn't even find a decent explanation online. For ex
"The logical consequence of taking these postulates together is the inseparable joining together of the four dimensions, hitherto assumed as independent, of space and time. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime
In relativity, there aren't four independent axes like there are in Euclidean 4-space. Rather, the time dimension is mathematically dependent on the spatial dimensions and vice versa. If I run across a halfway decent explanation online I'll post it.
I certainly agree with you that reality is one thing, and our historically contingent scientific models are another. I don't believe that "the universe follows the laws of physics," as I've heard some people say. Rather, the laws of physics are our current mathematical model this week, to be overturned tomorrow or in a century. I think we're in agreement on this.
Yes, now what about the way that mathematics links space and time, when will that be overturned?
I'm afraid my knowledge of physics is limited to reading Scientific American articles back in the day, and watching Youtube videos lately. My understanding is that general relativity would not be overturned, but rather incorporated by a more refined model just as relativity incorporates rather than overturns Newtonian gravity. By incorporates I mean, "Approximates as a special case."
There's a lot we don't know. The century-long inability to integrate electromagnetism with gravity is a definite clue that there's a deeper theory out there. So then we get into the string theory wars. Way more than I know about. It's actually very interesting. Physics is stuck. The Large Hadron Collider didn't find supersymmetry. That means there's no new physics to be found at any energy that taxpayers are likely to pay for. Always money for wars but not much for knowledge.
Well there's an answer to that. We distinguish between time, a particular aspect of the universe, and time as modeled in physics. It's traditional to model time as the mathematical real numbers. But that is not a claim that time itself is like that. After all when one embarks on the mathematical study of the real numbers, one soon finds that they are very unreal. The mathematical real numbers are an abstract technical construction that has no necessary relation to the thing in the universe that we call time. A lot of physicists don't understand that. They're taught: "This is time, and here are these equations," and they spend their life in that environment and often never step back and realize that they are only working with the map, not the territory. After all the world didn't change when we went from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian gravity. Only the model changed.
Ok Thanks
length,
width,
depth,
4D—your world-line;
5th, all your probable futures;
6th, jump to any;
7th, all Big Bang starts to ends;
8th, all universes’ lines;
9th, jump to any;
10th, the IS of all possible realities.
What do you make of infinite-dimensional spaces? An example would be the set of all continuous functions from the real numbers to the real numbers. This set is an infinite-dimensional vector space.
I think that math infinities don't count as actual infinities, they just being potential infinities, and that actual infinities are impossible since they can't complete, much as the definition of 'Infinite' hints at, plus that 'infinite' is not really an amount or a number, also because it cannot be capped.
Ten dimensions, or eleven, if we want to allow (0) as a point, seems to cover Everything, and perhaps this is why string theory also has those number of dimensions.
I wonder if by actual you mean physical. In math the axiom of infinity gives actually infinite sets; that is, infinite sets all of whose elements can be corralled into a single set. Of course these are not physical sets.
Yes.