Time, Distance, and Linearity

From Humans are free.com

Copyright © 2018

By Ralph F. Couey

Time.

We live with it every day.  In many ways, it defines our existence.  And yet as familiar as it is to us, time remains one of the things we least understand.

Our existence is linear.  In every way we perceive, it is to us a straight line with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  That is the context in which we understand life.  We are born -- the beginning.  We die -- the end.  At any point on the line between those two points, we define as the middle.  We understand that line.  It organizes things in a way easy to understand.  But the length of that line is as individual as the people who exist upon it, from less than ten minutes to more than ten decades.  Our line is but one of billions of other lines coexisting in the same space.  Stretching into the past are lines that started and ended long before us.  Other lines extend on into a future that remains a mystery.

We believe those lines are fixed, that they cannot be edited.  To get from Monday to Friday, we must pass through the intervening days.  In order to travel from Kansas City to St. Louis, you have to pass through Columbia.  This is the essence of the three dimensional universe we inhabit.  The linearity of time for us is the same as physical distance.  

Scientists and theoreticians accept the possibility that there may be more than just three dimensions, realms where the linearity that rules our lives is meaningless.

Think of it this way.  Take a piece of paper and put two points at opposite ends, labeled "here" and "there."  Now imagine if you lived in the two-dimensional world on that piece of paper.  You know all about left-right and forward-backward, but have no clue about up-down.  In order to go from here to there, you have to travel a straight line between.  Now, being the god-like being from the third dimension, fold the paper so that the points are now next to each other.  Now it's possible for that flatlander to travel from here to there without traversing the considerable distance in between.  With a little imagination, you might even see that those two points could occupy the same location at the same time.   Hard-core Star Trek fans recognize this as the underpinnings of warp drive.  the Enterprise (or Voyager, Defiant, or Discovery) crosses interstellar space not by making the ship go faster, but by warping the fabric of space to make things closer together.

Interstellar and intergalactic space is so huge that in order to measure distances you have to use an equally huge multiple, the light year.  This is the distance light travels in an earth year, at a rate of 186.000 miles per second.   That totals out to just under six trillion miles.  The light year is a short cut that can be more easily understood, and underestimated.  For example, the nearest star to earth is Proxima Centauri, which lies about 4.2 light years distant towards the constellation Centaurus.  That sounds like it's just across town.  But if you were aboard the fastest ship ever flown by humans, Voyager 1, even at it's breathtaking speed of 40,000 miles per hour, it would still take the better part of 17,000 years to get there.  The known universe consists of a bubble of space-time some 154 billion of those measures from end to end.

As Einstein told us, space and time are indelibly linked.  You can't look out into space without looking back into time.  Looking at the Orion constellation, you can readily see, even with the naked eye, the fuzzy patch that marks the stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula.  But you're not looking at the nebula as it exists right now, but rather about 1,300 years ago, because it took that long for the light hitting your eyes to travel from there to where you are.

Now go back to your piece of paper and change the labels on the dots from "here" and "there" to "now" and "then."  If you re-fold the paper, you can see that if space can be bent or warped, then also could time.  That means any place in the universe would be instantaneously accessible.  The technology to do such amazing things lies not centuries, but probably millennia ahead of us, if we can survive long enough to get there.  But it is the secret to true exploration of the known universe, and perhaps, even other places currently unknown.  

It is a romantic, if realistic notion, that other intelligent technological species exist in the universe.  It may be that somewhere out there is a such a civilization occupying a far higher dimensional plane where a scientist scans our three dimensional existence in the same way we look at flatland.  To share that perspective, that vision beyond linear distance, beyond time, beyond even consciousness allows the unseen to be seen; the unknown to become known.

And who knows?  Maybe there on a plane infinitely removed from ours, perhaps we might come face-to-face with that entity many of us identify as God.