Reminds me of Flatland.
I always get confused when some refer to time as the fourth dimension when there seem to be many more spatial dimensions than just the first three.
I always get confused when some refer to time as the fourth dimension when there seem to be many more spatial dimensions than just the first three.
Now visualizing them can become much more tricky but mathematically we can still describe them.
Thus to bring it to your point about time as the fourth dimension if you want to ask your friend to meet you for lunch in the empire state building, you would have to give him the longtotude and latitude of the Empire State building (x and y) the floor to meet you on (third dimension z) but you would also have to give him the time to meet you, time being the 4th data point and ergo the 4th dimension.
Honestly what confuses me is what special distinction does time get to make it not considered a dimension like the others?
(I’m not an expert, just remembering something I found interesting in Einstein’s book _Relativity_)
My less-than-a-layman understanding is that it really is just a physical point/plane - but as 3-dimensional creatures it will appear to us as time.
Sagan's flatland video shows the 3-d apple moving through 2-dimensional as transitory slices; the 2-d creatures don't see the entire apple because they are fine tuned for 2-d existence.
This reminds me of passage in a book or movie (can't remember which one) which talked about the idea of human beings in 4D as worms, with the tail of the worm being the baby, and the face being our current state. As we go through life we keep elongating the work and overlap ourselves in space.
Case in point is the star schema of traditional data warehouses: there is no end to the number of 'dimensions' that a fact may have. But they are really just attributes. Same could be said of dimensions in mathematic; they simply denote attributes, albeit in somewhat 'spatial-like' domains.