Let me just open with this to make it all clear: Humans from the minute they are born are trained to think in three dimensions. This is never intentional, but all the same it happens. Human eye perception is taught by getting infants to recognize objects through third-dimensional viewpoints. We develop a more acute sense of distance as time passes. We use corrective lenses to appropriately adjust our vision. We have difficulties seeing with crossed eyes. This merges into other senses such as hearing. We grow adapted to using the different signals received by our ears to more accurately pinpoint locations of sounds surrounding us. Basically we live in a three dimensional world. You probably are rolling your eyes or saying "Duh, 'cause we are." I'm not saying you're wrong. I wholeheartedly agree with you actually.
Here's where things get tricky. I've been thinking about time travel a lot recently and been considering principles such as Causality and how they can be implemented/exploited. I'll explain in another post, but I basically have come up with a theory as to my idea why time travelling backwards cannot physically work without violating the core principles of Causality. What that essentially means is that you cannot travel back in time without having the possibility that you're actions will result in you not time-travelling backwards at the exact moment that you did in the "future". Confused yet? Just wait. The difficult part is that you now have to start thinking in a fourth dimension.
Technically there are two fourth dimensions. The first is the fourth spatial dimension which is incredibly complicated to explain in the third dimension (again, I will explain it in a different post). The second is something called a temporal dimension, or a fourth dimension relative to time. This is where it can be tricky,as we have to visualize what might be called a series of third dimensions, a chain if you will. But this is not a conventional chain. It's almost like a strand of fishing wire: you can't see the individual connections because they are so small, so the wire looks like a solid piece.
So now let's get technical.
Let's start with a somewhat simple exercise (well, at least relatively). Imagine a box on a flat surface (let's say for argument's sake a table). When someone pushes that box, what do we see? We see a box moving across a flat surface. We only see the box in what we call a singular instance at a time. We do not see any "lag". A way to conceptualize lag is to take your computer cursor and move it really fast across your screen. Depending on your settings you can sometimes see a trail of cursors behind yours. We do not see this with the box. No matter how fast you move it (within reason) you only see it one "box" at a time.
To begin to visualize the fourth dimension you have to alter the settings in your mind, if you will. You have to begin to add that lag for yourself. Now lets look at moving the box again. As it moves in your mind, take mental pictures every second. Overlay the images into one. You should end up with the same box replicated a number of times with a regular interval between each one. Now do the same process again, but take a picture every half-second and overlay it. Same box, shorter intervals between them. Eventually if you keep doing this over and over again, you will find something interesting. Let's assume the box is a cube of width 1 meter. If the box moves at one meter per second, and you take a picture every second, there will be no interval between each box instance. This results in a weird phenomenon. While the box physically exists each second, when you look at the overlay image there is one seamless box. No matter how much shorter you take the time intervals at that point there will still be the same box. This overlay image even with the smallest possible time interval is the fourth temporal dimension. It is the continuous box. If you practice this exercise you can start to build up perception in a fourth dimension. Eventually you can easily and effectively visualize something like your hand moving through space in the fourth dimension. It looks like a solidly-outlined blur.
But I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into it. You can't simply say that to reverse time travel you pick out that one particular slice of the rectangular prism. You can only assume that our prism is rectangular because of how you perceive the world now. Here's the thing: everything moves in the universe. Including earth. You might already guess what that means. Yup! As it slides across the table, it also moves in space. This could give a prism of many possible shapes depending on how the surface it moves upon moves in spacetime. So that is the fourth dimension and the problems with simple isolation. If one were to try to pull a slice of that third dimensional existence, you can't merely calculate the position on earth. You would have to calculate where in the universe it was. I think that may be how it ties into Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Theoretically you can eliminate the tiny movement through spacetime by taking only a tiny time difference. But if the difference is exponential, then only that tiny time frame would give a definite an accessible distance away in spacetime (instead of across the entire universe). However I have reason to believe that that short time period falls in what I call the "instantaneous period" or the minimum uncertainty percentage allowable under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for time.
That is all I can say for now in my undeveloped theory's state. However I do believe that there needs to be a new field in physics to start to study human perception and its link with physics. I move that there be a new field entitled "Multidimensional Philosophy" which covers working on perceiving other dimensions. and getting past third-dimensional "training".
As always, thanks for reading. Questions and comments go in the comment box or in my Facebook inbox. Feel free to do either one!
--J
