January 21st, 2022/theorizing on time

Today’s Prompt: If you could, what year would you time travel to and why?

Hello, and welcome to theories on time travel! Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist, so all this may be way off base, but it’s what makes sense to my line of reasoning. If you have ideas or theories of your own, I’d love to hear them!

Basics

Time is the 4th dimension. That’s accepted as the prevailing theory among physicists, as far as I know. The first 3 dimensions are length, width, and height. So when you create 3 dimensional art–like a sculpture–it’s long, wide, and tall.

Length=measurement from forward to back.

Width=measurement from side to side. (Or maybe I’ve got length and width flipped. Anyone know?)

Height=measurement from up to down.

Time, as the fourth dimension, must then be a measurement similar to side to side, forward to back, or up to down. In other words, time is a measurement from past to future.

Movement

Here’s a thought experiment: when I jump up and down, I’m changing my measurement of height (where I am in space up and down), while keeping my length and width (relatively) the same. When I walk down a sidewalk, my height and width stay constant, but I’m changing where I am in space on the measurement of length.

Make sense?

Theoretically, then, you could change where you are on the line of time while keeping your other dimensions constant. You could stay in your exact location–at your desk, couch, patio, wherever–and slide backward and forward through the days and years.

Boom, time travel.

You could also theoretically keep your time constant (this day, this moment), and move your other dimensions. Take a walk to the park while nothing else moves.

Boom, freezing time.

Here’s my favorite part:

Remember that jumping example? Where you changed your height dimension but kept the other dimensions the same? Well, think about it this way: you can be at multiple points on the height dimension while the length and width dimensions remain constant.

By that reasoning, you can be at multiple points on the time dimension while the other dimensions remain constant. In other words, you could appear in the year 1987 and 24 and 62 all at the same point in space. Or (and here’s the big one), you can be at multiple points in 3D space while your time remains constant.

What that means is, you could appear in the same present in multiple points of space. You could move forward through time at different points in space. You could be in 3 places simultaneously throughout, say, today. Or this week. To everyone else, you might appear to have triplets. Or quintuplets. Or a whole army of your self, all going through their days.

Sounds super awesome, right?

So awesome that I want time powers. Unfortunately…we as humans are limited in how we move–we can only run so fast, or jump so high. I imagine we’re all steadily pulled into the future by some force like gravity, constantly in free fall. Minutes pass and we have no control over it.

So even if we did have the power to manipulate our time dimension, how much control would we have of our future free fall? Would we be like toddlers trying to jump off the ground, barely able to reach–briefly–a few moments into the future? Or could we train like marathon runners, and travel back and forth throughout time with relative ease?