Thought provoking article.

“infinite in time and space”

Let’s ask ourselves what that means. It means that if we keep going, and keep observing, that we will never reach an edge. That does not mean that things are actually out there to infinity.

But let’s ask a deeper question: What does it mean to “keep going”? It means that our translational velocity is positive and constant, and that time is also increasing. The relationship between time and space is non-zero. That’s really all it means. But we don’t understand those dimensions, really.

We experience cause-and-effect as changes of state, and we measure time that way too: that, say, a cesium clock created a tick event. Again, events. Time seems to be the only dimension in which all observable events seem to always require a change in the same direction — forward in the time dimension, which again we measure only in terms of events.

But what if the universe has more to it than that? What if there are other dimensions that behave the way time does, but which are inaccessible to us? What if we don’t really understand time?

We are unable to imagine “before the universe” — trying to conceptualize that seems to violate cause-and-effect: what created something from nothing? The fact that we cannot conceptualize it might mean that we are missing a really big piece. Or perhaps our minds are actually constrained in some way, the way that flatlanders would be unable to think in terms of three dimensions (or would they?)