eli5: Is time the same thing as the fourth spatial dimension?

Question

Are tesseracts and hyperspheres ‘time’? Or is it completely different?

In: 0

Answer 1

I think there’s a misconception that time is the 4th dimension. Its merely an added dimension to the 3rd so that we can perceive space time.

An object in 3D space can be marked by a set of coordinates (x, y, z). Imagine a red ball in (3, 4, 5). Now a few seconds later, it moves away and we have a blue ball in the same space (3, 4, 5).

This is confusing, so we add a 4th “dimension” called time to help us separate the two in space time.
(x, y, z, t)

So when t=1, red ball was (3, 4, 5, 1).
Then when t=2, let’s say red ball goes to (4, 4, 4, 2) and blue ball is in (3, 4, 5, 2)

This is a simple way to view space time.