If you’ve ever drawn a distance-time graph then you’ve used time as a dimension. A dimension isn’t fundamental to the fabric of the universe, it’s just about describing movement. We can describe movement in three spacial dimensions normally, and also we can describe their movement through time. It mostly comes up in special relativity where one object might not be moving through time at the same rate as another. This isn’t about time travel, it’s about how someone travelling very close to the speed of light would perceive time as travelling slower.
And to be clear: time isn’t *the* 4th dimension, it’s *a* 4th dimension. When you see mathematicians talking about 4 dimensional shapes, the 4th dimension isn’t time. It’s a fourth dimension of space that we can’t really understand visually but can still describe mathematically. 3 dimensions of space just means there’s three directions you can move in, x y and z. Adding a fourth dimension means adding another possible direction. This can be time but doesn’t have to be.
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