The Inca people believed reality depends on the moment it happens not unlike our modern concept of space-time. Hence, a tree flowers according to the season. There is thus not one single archetypal tree. To comprehend it fully we must consider each of its four dimensions simultaneously. These are its length, breadth, height, and the fourth one, time. This line of thinking vanished for centuries after invaders almost obliterated their advanced civilization.
Modern Space-Time Continuum Thinking
Albert Einstein’s teacher, Hermann Minkowski extended the special theory of relativity by emphasizing the geometric qualities of time and space.
“Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows,” he said in 1906. “Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
He called his new creation ‘space-time’. He regarded this as a continuum, because there are no intervals where time ceases to exist. His ‘invention’ has endured for over a century. Most physicists work within his paradigm that our world exists in four-dimensional space.
Adding General Relativity to the Soup
The theory of general relativity holds that energy and mass induce gravitational fields. This causes space-time to curve similarly to the way a bed dips when we lie on it. Black holes occur in space where forces are so immense the gravity traps everything, including light. There is no escaping it. Both space and time curve infinitely at this point.
The Relativity of Time and Space
When we are in motion as passengers in an airplane, time passes fractionally slower than when we are standing still.
Scientists have proved that time warps by sending atomic clocks up in rockets. These are accurate to one second in thirty million years when standing still on earth.
When they recovered them, they found they had all lost the same marginal amount of time. This was despite taking power from the electromagnetic spectrum instead of batteries. The Star Ship Enterprise accelerates to warp speed in the movie so the crew are almost motionless in the space-time continuum.
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