Let's take it back down to the personal level again for a second. Then consider the dizzying number of particles in the universe, and everything that could happen to them, and you quickly see the mind-blowing amount of alternate universes that this would imply. Imagine one of those physical or chemical reactions happening just a tiny bit differently, and this creates its own timeline. Think at an atomic level, the infinitely complex interactions that happen between particles. Probability (Possible Universes)Īnd this affects more than just human acts and decisions. This image is a short slice of Dave's 4-dimensional self, from several seconds before, ending with his present moment. Notice in the image above how "Present Dave" stands at the front of a procession of his former selves. What we see in the real-life present is merely a cross-section of this time-snake-person.
This snake would be thin at one end, representing our conception and birth, growing and thickening as we get older before thinning out and dispersing at the time of our death and decay. If we were to look at one person in four dimensions, they would look like a long, swirling, lumpy snake. Each of these points exists at the same moment, and each of them together makes up what we see as the line.įollowing that train of logic, if we could see time the way we see the first three dimensions, we would see each person and object at every point in their existence from beginning to end all at once. If we think about time like a line, we can see that if we zoom in, we can find infinite points along that line. The "you" of 2 hours ago still exists, just as much as the you reading these words.
That is, that every point along the line of time exists. But when thinking about dimensions, it's more helpful to think of time much like we do length, width, and depth. With the fourth dimension of time, it may be tempting to conceive of time the way our human brains perceive it: the past is gone, never to be seen again, the present is the continuously rolling moment of now that we are constantly experiencing, and the future has yet to happen.
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