Are tesseracts and hyperspheres ‘time’? Or is it completely different?
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The main thing that time has going for it which the spatial dimensions do not is that time *seems* to be asymmetrical. That is, there are certain processes which can happen going forward in time but not going backwards.
For example, if you drop a bouncy ball on the ground and watch it bounce, each time it bounces it will bounce a little bit less high. That’s because as it’s moving through the air and hitting the ground, some of the ball’s energy is constantly being lost to the environment. Now, it would be really really weird if a bouncy ball was sitting motionless on the ground, then spontaneously started bouncing, higher and higher until it landed in your hand.
That observation is captured in the 2nd law of thermodynamics which states that entropy in the universe is constantly increasing. What that means is that energy in the universe tends to spread out over time, rather than concentrating in one place. It’s natural for the ball to spread its energy into the environment but not the other way around. Since entropy only increases as time goes forward, moving forward in time does not have the same rules as moving backward in time, which is very unlike the spatial dimensions, where moving in any direction is pretty much the same.
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