Bent fourth dimension

[Queso]

i was just thinking to myself, and i was wondering if the fourth dimension, or the plane of time, is constant or not.

 

can it be bent at random, or only by severe gravitational pull such as a black hole?

 

for instance, could we perceive time to be a bit longer, or shorter than it actually is, due to a slightly variable time plane coexisting with us through space?

 

i KNOW that humans have their own ways of perceiving and sensing time, but could this be a possibility as well?

[Drip Curl Magic]

I've wondered about this as well. It seems like a legable assumption to me. The more I learn, the more I learn how unstable everything actually is. Why would time be an exception? I've had days that are seemingly identical to the day before it... but for some reason, the second day goes by WAY faster than the first day. I guess it could just be my emotional state and the chemical balance in my body. Hell, it could have been because of what i ate. Who knows? I think that fourth dimension fluctuation is probable.

[Buffy]

i was just thinking to myself, and i was wondering if the fourth dimension, or the plane of time, is constant or not. can it be bent...?

What a bent question, Orb! Cool! "Bending" from a mathematical viewpoint happens *into* another dimension: If you "bend" a line that is parallel to the X-axis in a 2D world, it bends "into" the space measured by the Y-axis. Try that with Time. That's why we have trouble visualizing 4D: we only really can grok 3D. "Constantcy" is perceptual too. We can see time "speed up" and "slow down", but only by measuring against our own "constant" measuring sticks. Equal spacing of the ticks on the stick is what we compare our perceptions to. If the ticks are squished, either we see it or we don't which means we're either being affected by te squishing or we're seeing someone else getting affected.

 

It all depends on your point of view....

 

We ride along in the Time dimension, having it appear to us as constant. There's no reason we can't push the accellerator pedal or the brake, although we haven't really figured out how to free-travel in this dimension yet. It would be way cool though....

 

Relativistically Existential,

Buffy

[Queso]

amazing buffy, glad to have you back around these parts.

always wise, thorough, and to the point.

[lindagarrette]

This is from Physics Van, a Q&A published on the web by U. of Illinois.

 

Time isn't quite the same kind of dimension as space. Einstein's special and general theories treat time and space together (you need three numbers to specify a location and one number to specify time to fully specify an event), but one of the coordinates is not like the others. The distance between two points in real space is given by the Pythagorean theorem: D=square root((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2 +(z1-z2)^2). With time included, a much more useful "distance" function which helps describe actual physical behavior is D=square root((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2+(z1-z2)^2-(c*t1-c*t2)^2). This minus sign makes all the difference! And the speed of light c comes in to set the scale of distance and time. This second "distance" is useful because it doesn't depend on how fast an observer is moving, while the first "distance" does. So yes, it is important to treat time along with the three spatial coordinates, but not all four coordinates can be treated the same.

[TheBigDog]

There is a book called "Faster than the Speed of Light" that I read a year or more ago. I claims that in the early days of the universe the speed of light was higher, and that helps to account for the formation of so much mass. It was interesting, but I am glad there was not a test at the end.

 

Bill