Dimension or Auxiliary Factor?

Time has certainly been used extensively as a crucial factor for many a scientifically or practically oriented mathematical and statistical calculation, or for an approach to a solution or a deeper understanding of nature, from the infinitesimally small to the almost unimaginably big and far away.

In physics, depending on the section of the scientific community whose views one subscribes to or which one is a part of, it is either taken as fact or a well-established theory (at least one with a highly plausible outcome) that speed and gravity exert a certain influence on time.

The Persistence of Memory
by Salvador Dalí

There's that scene, well-known by now in one or the other staging form or variation, of a bunch of daring astronauts starting off on a journey to another star system, or even a distinct planet somewhat earlier discovered by means of a new array of radio telescopes (such as the Square Kilometre Array) or a powerful orbital telescope (such as the Hubble), which would see them arrive there - from the perspective of their fellow earthlings back on the home planet - after about twenty years.

Yet for them onboard their vessel - depending on how close to the speed of light they'd be able to dash to their destination in their flash new space craft propelled by one of those systems that are currently in their pre-infancy theoretical stages - only a year or two might have passed, though they would have experienced every second like a second, much like people back on Earth.

Objectively speaking, that is, and therefore measurably, these would be experiences inside people's respective environments - one might almost feel inclined to say "inside their respective universes" influenced by flexible factors that create stable and comparable circumstances inside their spheres of influence - which is the reason why we are dealing with different objectivities to begin with, and under the exclusion of emotions, moods and tempers that can subjectively influence the experience of the passage of time for, say, the astronauts.

(Microsoft Media)

Taken the growing distance between the spaceship and Earth, communication between the astronauts and their headquarters on Earth would either be adapted by their trusted computers, since, even at the speed of light, it could hardly be instantaneous - meaning: in real-time conditions. But what real time anyway, one might wonder. Whose time is the real one? They would both have to be, just differently so. There'd have to be a certain delay with which any given message would arrive.

Or there'd be the Mickey-Mouse effect for the astronauts when they have to digest an Earth minute in five to ten seconds as opposed to the drag effect for listeners back on Earth with words and voices drawling along in slow motion, stretching a minute's worth of onboard chitchat to about ten minutes. - Or is this imagery completely wrong to begin with? Could there be a natural adaptation en route? We haven't experienced it yet, if ever we will, so for now it's difficult to say.

But what if time is just the measurement of movement and no more? After all, we have precision atomic clocks now that take the time by the oscillations or energy-level jumps performed by electrons. We can even download "atomic clock sync utilities", or probably apps for mobile phones, to optimize how our computers and smart-phones receive updates from time-servers.

(Microsoft Media)

This makes a second equal to more than nine billion oscillations or spin cycles of the electron of, most likely, a caesium atom. More correctly, the microwave signal is being used for measurements, the signal namely that electrons in atoms emit when they change from one energy level to another - at a particular temperature, mind you, because not just molecules, further down and into the structures of their component parts, even electrons oscillate or spin or jump levels more or less rapidly depending on the surrounding temperature.

If that leaves you amazed, you're not alone. Much of our modern technology, including GPS, has come to depend on it. Simpler, and more traditional, chronometers are even calibrated according to atomic-clock output, taken that time measurements by atomic clocks can be expected to be absolutely reliable for thousands if not millions of years to come.

So what, therefore, if this analogy of electron movement compared with time elapsing is not an analogy at all, but instead all there is to time, or rather the perception of time? Meaning: there's no time at all but just movement and we use it much like a standardised scale of millimetres on a ruler to measure geographic distance, in those auxiliary units.

(Microsoft Media)

Certainly, if speed and gravity are intertwined and exert an effect on molecular movements - such as on electrons racing around the core of an atom (something much more divisible than its name of Greek origin would suggest) inside their cloud spaces - and all of this in turn has an effect on the general movement of things and people composed of and living inside spaces themselves composed of such slowed-down atoms forming molecules and bigger structures further up as we go from the microcosm into our world visible with our own naked eyes (i.e. without microscopes) and beyond (where we'd need telescopes), then there'd still be a difference between how we experience time, i.e. the movement of everything from subatomic particles upwards, inside the spaceship at the speed of light for one, and back on earth for another.

But time wouldn't be a dimension, then, or would it. And objectivity would seem to become astonishingly subjective by its nature.

This would ultimately mean, measuring change by means of what we call time in seconds, and nano-seconds for scientific purposes, that we are not tapping into a further dimension in its own right after all. Time would instead be no more than a ruler for measuring the distance on Earth between, say, two city centres or from the surface of any given point on Earth to the closest point on the surface of the moon.

The fourth dimension then wouldn't be time at all - not to mention further dimensions that come in so handy in some mathematical models and which would be another story altogether and not under scrutiny at this point... in time?

The fourth dimension may even be from where we could see three-dimensional quantum realities inside our 3D universe much like points on the surface of a sphere that we can observe and point at from any given position in our three-dimensional world.

(Microsoft Media)

For a being, human or otherwise, adapted to life in a four-dimensional world, we would be like the (theoretical) two-dimensional homunculus that Einstein had used to explain to us why we were having trouble imagining a three dimensional reality curved in the fourth dimension, much like a two-dimensional life form would be at pains on the surface of a sphere (a balloon in Einstein's example) to grasp the quantum leap up yet another dimension his flat world existed in... or on.

Would, at some stage, he (or she or it, who knows, we have some trouble, too, imagining 2D life forms, don't we) happen to see the shadow of the sphere on which he lived his two-dimensional life, the shadow would be just two-dimensional again anyway, but he'd have trouble understanding where the shadow came from. Is that when we spot something we cannot fully if at all understand but try to in the context of our three-dimensional world?

We might already have spotted something that exists in more dimensions than three but we were unable to make sense of it. Did we try to explain it as a UFO? Maybe, but we cannot be sure. Will we ever be able to probe into more dimensions than three other than by way of mathematical models? Do we really understand the implications of such models?

Or will we forever remain the two-dimensional homunculi trying to make sense of our world, curved in another dimension?