h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm appalled at the notion of time as less than a third rate dimension. Without time, there would be no other dimensions, as three dimensional reality must endure through time to be perceived.

I also find it odd to describe time as a "two way street." Time exists all around the observer, with the sum total of the events of the universe set in it. Time is the street, the sidewalk, the buildings, the sewers, and the sky. It spreads out from the individual in all directions, and across all plains; not just back into the past, or forward into the future, but outward into the endless expanse of the present.

This is not to say that time is the most important of dimensions. No dimension is more important than another. In fact, considering the interdependancy of the common dimensions, and the inexplicable nature of whatever other dimensions may exist, It seems more likely that there is only one dimension, and what we perceive as a three dimensional reality existing in a forth is due to our own failure to understand the true reality of the situation.

But the street he is on about IS the universe as a whole, or rather time as a whole. He was just expressing it in a way the standard layperson or casual observer could cope with without reaching for the theasaurus. Sheesh.

Time sold short, Underman! Au contraire, and heaven forbid!

Dimensionality has proven to be a useful concept in theoretical physics, as well as in the real world. Certainly one can point to one's side in any of 360 degrees, and an infinite number of partial degrees, but plane geometry helped sort all of that into the three with which we commonly cope.

You are correct when pointing out how interconnected they all are with time. And even a two-dimensional universe would need to exist in time for any perception or change to be possible. But, I don't think I shorted time by suggesting that forward is not its only direction.

In fact, I believe that I doubled its importance by suggesting that it is bi-directional.