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Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by Lambdanaut on Monday August 31, 2020 @09:54AM (#24331455)
During a salvia trip I once saw the universe like this. I had been sitting on this conveyor-belt-like structure my entire life, which was the 4th component(time) in that 4-Vector. The conveyor belt moved me along perpindicular to space, which I have been observing my entire life from the constant speed of time. Only on this trip was I able to look "down" and realize that I was riding on time.

The interesting thing was that I had this feeling that the other elements of the vectors were all also conveyor belts, moving in a single direction. X, Y, Z(and an infinite of other more subtle scalars) were each their own belts, with entities of a very different hyperdimensional sort riding along them. Essentially, they were each moving at a constant non-changing rate along a single dimension(X, Y, or Z) and because of this, they used time as we do a spatial dimension.

Think about it like this.

Imagine that a trillion years ago you were stationary, and time didn't exist. SUDDENLY you and all the stuff nearby you got pushed in space along the X axis at a speed of 100000000000 km/hr.

You kept moving along the X axis at a relatively constant rate with the stuff around you, such that the X-axis became a constant for you, while the other spatial dimensions were your degrees of freedom.

In this scenario, time is the X axis for you.

I noticed that there were entities moving perpendicular to our concept of time, treating our X-axis as their conveyor belt moving them along at a constant rate.

All a drug trip of course, and I don't know much about physics, however, this experience has shaped how I concieve of time and space.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by dreamcompiler on Monday August 31, 2020 @10:17AM (#24331675)
> I noticed that there were entities moving perpendicular to our concept of time, treating our X-axis as their conveyor belt moving them along at a constant rate.

Those entities exist: We call them photons (and a few other things). Photons move through space at a constant rate, c, and their clocks never move. If a photon were conscious it might ask "What is this time you speak of?"

It gets weirder: Because photons don't experience time they can't "remember" being in Place A "before" they were in Place B, so they might also ask "What is this space you speak of?" Photons are always everywhere they need to be, from their point of view.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by lovehashbrowns on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:49PM (#24334020)
Vsauce has a great video on this concept. https://youtu.be/ACUuFg9Y9dY (Would Headlights Work at Light Speed?)

I recommend watching it!

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by dzmien on Monday August 31, 2020 @03:20PM (#24335005)
In that respect the Time Minders from the computer game Anachronox are like photons. If you've never played the game, Time Minders were creatures that experienced all time simultaneously. As such, they were found scattered around the levels and could be used by the player to "freeze" a moment in time. In other words, they were the mechanism by which the player could save her game. If I recall correctly, playing with an easier difficulty setting allowed the player to save the game at any time via the menu.
Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by jerf on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:18AM (#24332326)
"Essentially, they were each moving at a constant non-changing rate along a single dimension(X, Y, or Z) and because of this, they used time as we do a spatial dimension."

For what it's worth, time is distinguished in physics. It isn't just "another dimension" that "happens" to be used as time, but if you could just twist correctly it would become a spatial dimension. It is truly a "time dimension". The simplest way of looking at it is in the Minkowski metric, where distance is SqRt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - t^2), note the minus sign on the "t" which distinguishes it.

If you're really up for a solid math-based mind-screw, Greg Egan worked out the shape of physics in a universe that works on essentially Einsteinian relativity, but with two spatial dimensions and two temporal dimensions: https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html It turns out that A: sensible things can be said about this and B: it looks nothing like what I expected two temporal dimensions to look.

(And if that's not enough, he's also got a universe of four spatial dimensions: https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html)

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by thomasahle on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:27AM (#24332415)
> Greg Egan worked out the shape of physics in a universe with two spatial dimensions and two temporal dimensions:

I am looking forward to this next Christopher Nolan movie.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by klenwell on Monday August 31, 2020 @03:55PM (#24335328)
I'm thinking of the old Pacman arcade game but with two joystcks, one for spatial movements and the other for temporal movements. I have no idea what the second joystick would do.

That is, I can imagine time as a single axis so that you could go back and forth. (Ooops, about to be eaten by a ghost, let's rewind.) But I can't imagine what it means to go northwest in time.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by cmehdy on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @10:13PM (#24349360)
I could imagine that if for example the x axis is our normal time, the y axis would be timelines. That is, you would move to an entirely different configuration of the world for the given space coordinates and the same value of time on the x axis. Now if you ask me about a third dimension of time..

Disclaimer: my ideas come before having done my homework on the link above, so I need to read Greg Egan's stuff really. He's such a wonderful person and I need to dedicate more brainpower to his work.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by klenwell on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:40PM (#24349769)
Interesting. When I mediated about it a little further that's where I sorta arrived too. The x-axis would be future/past. The y-axis would be different timelines. So if I go from present (0,0) to (2,2), I'd be going 2 clicks into the future and 2 timelines up (whatever that means!).

In Pacman terms, I guess you could program it so that going up or down with the second joystick changes the terms of the game slightly. Maybe the maze configuration changes or in one timeline the ghosts bounce off you when you run into them but the walls themselves zap you.

In a more nuanced conception of the timeline axis, I suppose y-points would have to be branched or braided off x-points. Maybe that's where the third dimension comes in.

I'm sure Egan has worked it out with more rigor. I checked out the link for one of his books above but I admit I blanched when I got to the synopsis:

Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right.

I've got enough on my plate at the moment with the dissolution of civil society. I'm not sure I'm ready to entertain leech-like symbionts confronting the disintegration of time itself.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by kridsdale1 on Wednesday September 02, 2020 @12:14PM (#24354641)
SUPER-HOT mixed with Braid
Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by shoes_for_thee on Monday August 31, 2020 @10:54AM (#24332055)
My question -- and I am not being glib -- is there something to the idea that we can "raise our vibration" and would doing so decrease our speed through time?
Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by antepodius on Monday September 14, 2020 @04:41AM (#24468089)
You just need to accelerate and move around in space, which is equivalent to rotating your spacetime velocity vector slightly towards the spatial axes.

Or be under gravity.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by dfalzone on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:05PM (#24333492)
Source(s):

Saw this in a salvia trip once

Edit: Why the downvotes? This was clearly supposed to be a joke.

Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by Lambdanaut on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:17PM (#24333620)
Just something to inspire thought. Take it or leave it.
Re:Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? by layoutIfNeeded on Monday August 31, 2020 @10:28AM (#24331782)
What kind of "entities"? Beings?