A Rational Cosmology: Time as a Dimension

Since it is impossible for any event to change the past, no entity can have the same age at a given instant in time as it did at some other temporal instant. Since the process of change is, by definition, one of change taking place, rather than annihilating the fact that it had taken place, the latter of which is impossible, any measurement pertaining to change must be positive.

Since the sum total of all changes (including mutually antagonistic changes) that have ever occurred can only accumulate, time, the quality of entities that renders change possible must, too, possess positive increments and constantly accumulate in its magnitude within every entity.

Though the three spatial dimensions have the ability to increase or decrease in their magnitude within any given entity, the fourth dimension, time, can only increase in its magnitude.

The reason why time is, too, a dimension, though not a spatial one, is the impossibility of relating any two real entities without describing some involvement of the quality, "time."

Even if we consider two spheres frozen at some set distance apart, we must still make mention of the fact that the two spheres are in such a position simultaneously, recognizing that the spheres' relationship was not merely a part of each sphere's bygone history, nor is it only possible as the spheres accumulate age (i.e. in the future).

We merely admit that there is some dimension (time) which is mentally held constant for the purposes of the present examination, as we are only observing the relationship of the spheres in one particular moment, as we had, in "The Euclidean Line", observed the relationship of real, three-dimensional boxes in only one dimension.

Were such spheres to exist, there would be no way to hold the fourth dimension constant except as a mental model! The three-dimensional boxes did not become one-dimensional simply because man used a Euclidean one-dimensional line to accurately express their relative position in terms of only the dimension, width.

Likewise, spheres with an existence in three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension do not cease existing in the temporal dimension merely because the factor of time is beyond the scope of somebody's present observation of the spheres. In the real world, while man performs an analysis of what the spheres' spatial relationship was when the spheres each had some given age, the spheres' age continues to increase, uniformly, as the very investigation is conducted! Read other parts of "A Rational Cosmology" by clicking here.