by BClaw » Wed Apr 28, 2004 4:19 am
I am very strongly of the opinion that whatever the fourth dimension may be, it isn't time. It's a physical dimension, at right angles to our present reality, to be sure, perhaps even tightly coiled up so that we cannot easily detect it, but still physical. I also am attracted to the idea of time *moving* through a fourth dimension, so that a bouncing ball would actually be a twisty sort of four-dimensional tube, with it's past and future both readily viewable. However, even if this were the case (and I very seriously doubt it is), time is still separate from the fourth dimension. To me, it would be like saying that a hill *is* time because a ball rolls down it. Instead, I say that time exists apart from the hill, and our skewed and incomplete view of the actual universe can make it seem that time is the fourth dimension, when the fourth dimension, like the hill, is merely coincident geometry.