How can you explain the Time as a Dimension?

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How can you explain the Time as a Dimension?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You should put more info in your question so people can address what your actual preconceptions are about dimensions are. People ask questions like this a lot and it’s not always clear where they are coming from.

If you mean as a “spatial” dimension, well, time isn’t a spatial dimension.

When people talk about time as a “dimension”, what they mean is 1 degree of freedom, or rather, how many numbers you need to describe the thing you’re talking about. Time requires a single number in order to describe. One event happens 5 seconds before another, or something occurred over a span of 12 minutes. That single number that describes it means that time has 1 dimension. If we talk about where something is in space, we need 3 numbers: how far is it left/right, how far forward/back, and how high, so space is 3-dimensional (for example, we could say a box is 1 ft x 2 ft x 2.5 ft, that’s 3 numbers).

There’s really no need to overthink it beyond that.

Now if you’re confused because you’ve heard about people talking about 4-dimensional space-time, all they’re doing is combining the 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time and talking about them at the same time. For most purposes this isn’t even necessary, and it only really comes into play if you’re doing stuff with General Relativity. The gist of it is that at some sort of fundamental level, space and time are inextricably linked, and anything that has mass (or energy) will warp both space and time simultaneously, so you have to do the math to work it out for both space and time at the same time.

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