Carrion Luggage

Three Times

I can't decide whether this article is an argument for, or against, the use of psychedelics. I'm leaning toward "for," but I like my world to contain a little bit of absurdity; it makes life more interesting. From Futurism:

    Time Is Three-Dimensional and Space Is Just a Side Effect, Scientist Says  
"These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting."

It's not a theory. At best, it's a hypothesis. At worst, it's what happens when you get a bad batch of shrooms.

A fringe new theory suggests that time is the fundamental structure of the physical universe, and space is merely a byproduct.

"Fringe" is right.

According to Gunther Kletetschka, a geologist — not a physicist, you'll note, but more on that later — from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, time is three-dimensional and the dimensions of space are an emergent property of it, a press release from the university explains.

I could make up shit, too, and put it in a press release. I don't; I put it in a blog instead, or a story or poem. Actual science would go into a paper published in a reputable journal and get peer-reviewed. It could still be wrong, but at least it was taken seriously.

The idea of reality being "an emergent property" of something deeper isn't that far out there. Temperature, for instance, is the average kinetic energy of the atoms that make up a substance; it's not proper to talk about the temperature of a single atom, or of atomless vacuum. Atoms themselves can be thought of as emergent from particular configurations of other kinds of energy.

This sort of thing, though, is what leads people to airily proclaim that everything we think is real is actually an illusion, which I say stretches the definition of "illusion" beyond usefulness. It also opens the door for the person saying it to insert whatever they think is "really real" into the discussion. That, however, is a philosophical and semantic argument, not a scientific one, even if it's based on scientific discoveries. It also helps keep cannabis growers in business.

Three-dimensional time is a theory that has been proposed before, though generally in pretty inaccessible terms. Similarly to the explanation for three dimensions of space — length, width, and depth — 3D time theory claims that time can move forward in the linear progression we know, sideways between parallel possible timelines, and along each one of those as it unfolds.

Notably, Robert A. Heinlein used some version of that in his 1980 novel The Number of the Beast. Like I said, one can make up whatever and use it in a story. It's still not science, even if it's science fiction.

Again, though: not a theory, except in the colloquial sense. It's not provably wrong (yet), like the idea that the Earth is flat or that Nazis have had a base on the Moon since the 1940s.

Extraordinary claims all call for extraordinary evidence. And the claims here are already stirring controversy: as an editor's note added to the end of the press release cautions, the scientist's theory was published in the journal Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences, a "legitimate step," but one that isn't remotely sufficient to take it out of the realm of the fringe.

I dispute that this is a "legitimate step." That journal has about the same level of relevance as this blog.

"The theory is still in the early stages of scrutiny," the note concluded, "and has not been published in leading physics journals or independently verified through experiments or peer-reviewed replication."

Translation: "this guy just made this stuff up."

Still, it's a fascinating concept to consider — especially because we still don't know exactly how time works, anyway.

And to be clear, it's important to come up with these things. The mistake people make isn't using their imagination; it's falling into the trap of believing that their imagination matches up with reality.

I should emphasize here that none of this means the hypothesis is wrong (or right). Or that certain drugs shouldn't be legalized.