Does time melt together when time wrinkles?

Question

Or can it be ironed out to show the hidden time?

Answer 1

It is a little bit dangerous to get too attached to viewing time in spatial terms...but what the hell, we like to live on the edge right?

If you take the view that time is the fourth dimension, you have to try to envision everything, all matter, as not only taking up 3D space, but also extended forward and backward in the fourth dimension, time. To "see" an object in all four dimensions, try to imagine its entire existence at once, as a 3 dimensional picture, whose depth is the beginning and end of its existence. If you turn it around inside your head, you can almost see it as little slices all lined up next to each other, but the closer you look it blurs together into one (told you this stuff was dangerous). If you could view the entire existence of an object in one shot, that would be pretty close to seeing in four dimensions.

Now as to the question of the wrinkles and their connections. I think it is helpful to use Dustin Hoffman's blanket from I Heart Huckabees. Everything in the universe is connected, it's all made from the same (or very similar) "stuff", matter, all following the same (or similar) universal laws. One of those universal laws is time, but unlike the other ones, time has alot of ammendments: such as its ability to "slow down" or "speed up" in relation to the observer.

The blanket has all sorts of wrinkles as it lies on the floor, some places it even folds backwards over itself. View these wrinkles as being caused by objects moving at different speeds through the fabric of the universe. Now, put a fan under the blanket so it is billowing around, the wrinkles becoming a complex of movement and change. This is the objects in the universe changing speed, and hence having different subjective experience of time.

It doesn't need to "melt together" as it is already woven together. The fabric of all the matter in the universe is always and unchangeably connected, it can wrinkle but it doesn't rip. If it is true that any change in speed changes time, the person sitting on the park bench watching someone jog by are actually in (minuscule-ly) different perceptions of time, however they can still interact, they are still both part of the blanket. All the different passages of time can be viewed and in complex interaction.

Ok, I need a nap. I'm not sure if this answers your question, I don't personally agree with Einstein's relativity theories, but hopefully this conveys some more imagery of how it is supposed to be viewed.

Answer 2

No, it puckers.