About Flatland and Time

Time in Flatland

Imagine a 3d pencil passing through 2d space. First you see a black dot (pencil tip), then a brown circle appears around the dot (the sharpened wood), first the circle grows slightly and then abruptly changes into a yellow hexagon (the six flat sides of a yellow pencil). The thin (because it's just paint) yellow hexagon surrounds a thicker brown hexagon (the wood) and in the center a small round black dot (the pencil lead). After a while the hexagon disappears and is replaced by a metal circle surrounding a pink rubber disk (the eraser). Very quickly the metal circle is gone and only the pink disk remains. Shortly afterwards this completely disappears and nothing is left. This whole process took place over a period of TIME.

If the 3d pencil passed completely through the 2d space at a constant rate (not stopping or changing speed) then a 2d person observing this strange object that appeared out of nowhere, changed shape and color, and then disappeared, might be able to think of time as a third dimension and picture in her imagination an overall strange (3d) shape that all at the same time possessed the different changing shapes that appeared as simple 2d objects. In other words, by thinking of time as a third dimension the 2d person can picture what we would think of as simple 3d object, a pencil.

We, as 3d people, can do this if we imagine a changing process that takes place over time as existing simultaneously in all of its different aspects. Imagine yourself as a baby, a child, a young adult, a mature adult, and an old adult. Now imagine yourself as a long, stretched out object that at one end is a baby and at the other end is an old person, all at the same time. This is one way of considering or picturing time as another dimension.

Swiped this from a Yahoo Answers post. BTW, I don't think that 2D space is really like this. It is more like what is described at the end of the last post; the third dimension is "contained" inside the more fundamental 2D space. I think that energy (a photon) is a 2D phenomenon existing (from its own perspective) in 2D space. We perceive it as "painting" what we see as the 3D universe.

Imagine a flat, 2D space with a flat dot (a photon) embedded in it. A 3D observer imposes, or forces, a 3D perspective on this phenomenon and by doing so "sees" the photon stretched across 3D space, but the 3D observer only perceives the end points of the photon and assumes that he is looking at two separate and distinct objects. He takes measurements from the "two" photons and has to conclude that they are mysteriously and inexplicably "entangled" with each other. In reality it is simply the same photon being simultaneously observed from two differing perspectives. Things are simply simpler at the quantum level. Being mysterious to us we assume that it is complex.