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If time is the fourth dimension, then movement within that dimension means travelling back and forward in time – as we know it – and that would be no more remarkable than walking up and down a flight of stairs.
Up to the top and back down again in the fourth dimension would be possible but so would climbing the stairs and then returning to the point before the stairs were climbed instead of climbing back down.
Looking in on our universe from the fourth dimension would be like looking into the bubble.
While the bubble exists a person could look up, back over, under and continue to view the bubble from any angle they chose. If the bubble was made burst resistant that same person could look in – withdraw – revisit from a different angle and withdraw as and when they wanted.
Given that in the fourth dimension that could include forward and backward in time, then visits could be made on any occasion, and some of those occasions would be thousands of years apart as witnessed from within the universe.
David rubbed his temples.
Also, if the universe were to lose mass bit by bit then from outside it would look as though it was simply reducing in volume but as reducing implies that time is passing then surely the universe ‘pops’ into existence and just as it appears it disappears, all within the instant of the ‘pop’.
However, because there is no movement of time in the fourth dimension – only movement through time, and in any direction - then the fragile infinitely small existence of the universe is irrelevant because having existed it is always there to be visited.
The apparent decay of the universe is only perceptible from within and gravity, it would seem, is the universe disintegrating as it reverts to a state it never really left.
David was feeling unusually depressed as these thoughts grew in his mind.
If his ideas were representative of a bigger reality than our universe, then that reality was such a fleeting non-event that it didn’t seem, to him, that reality could possibly matter. Then again, if the universe existed at all in the fourth dimension, his thought processes had reasoned that it would be there forever because to exist for in instant in the fourth dimension meant that the universe could only ever be. It could never ‘not’ be.
David reached for a can. It was ginger beer and the feeling at the back of his throat, as he drank, was a welcome reminder that however fleeting this existence, there are some great tastes and feelings to enjoy.