If I drive my car through a corner slowly I’ll be fine. If I go fast, the car will skid off the road. All the materials are the same, the execution is the same. The only difference is over what amount of time this happens? The example is not important, the same goes for pretty much anything. Filling a bottle, ripping a sheet of paper..
I understand this from a intuitive perspective, but I wonder if someone can explain why time matters in physics in a simple way. What is the fundamental difference between doing something fast vs. slow.
I’m sure this is a silly question if you know some thermal dynamics or special relativity, but remember, I’m only 5!
In: Physics
I think a good way to look at this is to remember that Newton’s physics, although very well conceived, are known now to be incorrect. They work at short distances, speeds, and gravitational influences, but when any of these things reach their extremes, Newtonian physics falls apart.
Einstein’s great leap of genius was to realize that time does not represent the *flow* of the universe; it represents the *shape* of the universe. In short, although it’s absolutely counterintuitive to humans, every single experiment that has ever tested any aspect of Einstein’s theories have shown them to be correct. Time isn’t what we intuitively think it is. Time as a *flow* is an illusion—an emergent property of experience, not a fundamental aspect of reality.
So as for why it matters, taking the fact that time is a dimension: it matters for the same reason that a photo of a statue and a statue are two different things. Add in one more dimension to the shape of a thing, and it’s a vastly different thing.
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