What is the space time continuum?
In: Other
Man, a bunch of ELI25s got posted to the wrong sub. Here’s the skinny mate. There’s two parts to this.
The continuum portion refers to smoothness. Basically, it’s like a slide (continuous) versus stairs (has gaps). Our experience of time and space is like a slide. We don’t hop from one step to the next. We smoothly move between places and into the future, like going down a slide instead of walking down stairs.
The space-time part: Think about space for a second, just in the room around you. You can go forward and back or side to side by walking. But if you turn to your right, now what was forward and back is side to side, and what was side to side is forward and back. In math, this is a rotation between two dimensions and there are special math rules that go with that. Now of course there are three of these space directions (up/down, front/back, side/side) and then we have time. The space and time seem different. But it turns out, that the math used to describe rotating to your right, also allows you to “rotate” between spatial dimensions and times (this is special relativity). So in a way, it’s like “turning” into time instead of right.
Things that are described by the same math are essentially considered the same. So even though our experience of space vs time seems very different, since the math of rotating between different space dimensions allows rotating into time, they are considered the same.
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