One day, as I read Scientific American while eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese, I thought of creating a new version of chess. Since the current version only uses x and y axes, two dimensions, why not add a z axis? You know, like up and down. I started thinking of plastic cubes and intricate magnet wands to move the pieces.
Turns out my idea for 3D chess didn’t break any ground. Mathematicians have already gone beyond 3D and 4D versions of the game, or at least that’s what I hear. Still, I came upon the idea on my own. That makes me an original imitator. And really, accounting for time as a dimension, my chess would be 4D.
Now hold on. If I think of time as a dimension, don’t we imagine only one axis on which motion occurs in one direction? Obviously we can think of going back in time, as Michael J. Fox brilliantly portrayed, but what about going up or down in time? Side to side?
Nevermind. What’s important is that I learned something new last night. Reading Briane Greene’s explanation of Special Relativity, it turns out all objects move at a fixed speed – the speed of light – but that motion divides into the four dimensions. Like, right now I’m going at a certain speed through time while also moving at certain speeds in the spatial dimensions.
If I managed to move at something close to light speed in one of the spatial dimensions, the speed at which I move through time would decrease proportionally. The total speed remains constant. That’s theoretical physics’ time travel: go super fast and you will live eight years while others live sixty. Jump into their future.
But does this connect with the motion of our minds? Do all people have a fixed speed that their consciousness moves at, which is then divided into varying “directions”? Or do we start at different speeds? Can we level up?
I’m thinking of the “Create a Character” mode in video games. You get a certain amount of points – say, twenty – which you divide into the character’s different abilities. I put ten into speed, three into balance, five into strength, and two into stamina. Or ten into processing, three into communication, five into confidence, and two into focus.
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For my character I want 5 for stamina, 5 for strength, 3 for command, 2 for communication, and 1 for feces
If you move in time like Doc Brown, then you must move in space too, for the earth is far from where you are at the beginning of your trip. In order to keep up with the motion of the earth, the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, you must move in space when you move in time. Moving in time alone is akin to space travel. You stop moving in relation to everythiing else to go backward in time and you go faster in relation to everything else to go forward. You stop, slow or speed time for yourself (and your machine), but not for the universe. Doc and Marty travel in time within the context of a single location, and that requires motion through space to its coordinates at any given moment in time.
Going backward in time always made storybook sense to me, but future travel violated too many common sense memes about how the world works to allow suspension of disbelief. I love fantasy, but not dressed in scientific clothes.
As far as we are concerned, consider the miracle that light moves at the speed of light within our timeframe, so all our visual perception is buffered somehow, but we manage to anticipate and somehow react to things that move much faster than the messages from the eyes can be received, processed, and then sent to muscles to react. Our nervous system seems to operate in some way outside of time, because there is latency in all of our sensory inputs and our muscle control outputs, but we manage to do things like harmonize, synchronize our movements, hit a moving baseball or a motionless golf ball, even conduct an orchestra where an eyebrow movement can convey a change so immediate that it seems like mindreading. So at the nanolevel I think there are time/space dimensional shortcuts used by our biology. Someday someone will discover how it works and try to scale it up, but I think the rules become different in our macro-world, and things are possible in the nano-mass, sub-atomic world that are impossible in our massy universe.
My other time-related postulate is that your sense of personal time when reconsidered is directly proportional to your age. In other words, a day is one seventh of a week to a one year old, but an hour, day, month and year seem 50 times shorter to a 50 year old.
There is a corollary cliche that time flies when you're having fun. I know it seems to pass faster when you are working at something you love, and it's hard not to love fun.
And don't forget to include those bio-tasks in your character builder. Otherwise they'll be full of shit.
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