Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

Take a piece of paper and draw a large rectangle. Somewhere at the top of the rectangle draw a T, to remind you that the upwards/forwards/north direction is Time. Time is forwards. Remember that.

Now, take a pencil and slowly and steadily draw a line from the bottom of the paper to the top. Steadily is the key word here. Allow your pencil to progress from bottom to top at a constant rate, no speeding up or slowing down, just gradually making progress from bottom to top.

The line you’ve made is equivalent to standing still. It is what happens when you just stay at rest and time moves you steadily forward.

Now take your pencil and start at the bottom, perhaps in the same place as the first point, and try to move your pencil at the same speed as before. Imagine that something is pulling your pencil towards the top, but at the same time you’re going to try and reach the left or right side of the paper. What you’ll get is some sort of a diagonal line, and if you’re trying to move at the same speed as before you’ll find that of course the diagonal is longer than the straight line and it takes a longer time to reach the top if you’re also trying to diagonally reach the right or the left side.

If up/north/forward is time, and left and right is all the movement you do in your normal life in all the ordinary dimensions, then you are like the diagonal line. Whenever you move in space you’re moving less in time. You haven’t stopped moving in time or changed direction, but you are moving more slowly through time- you’re up/north/forward progress has been diverted to the left or right.

That’s what it means to think of Time as a dimension. It is how our universe is put together, strange as that seems. Every time you move, if you go for a walk or take an airplane or drive a car, you’re moving more slowly in time than you would be if you were in free fall, at rest, motionless.

This is probably not why very active people who move about all the time seem younger. The effect is too small for us to notice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. If you want to try and get more of an intuitive understanding of what Einstein did to change our understanding of the universe then all you have to do, next time you’re going for a drive or taking an airplane, is imagine that your movement is diverting some of your path through time and making time move slower.

This is probably not why air travel seems to take forever.