clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org
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20 <strong>surfing</strong> <strong>through</strong> hyperspace<br />
A direct analogy involves an illustration of an "eternitygram" representing<br />
two discs rolling toward one another, colliding, and rebounding. Figure 1.5<br />
shows two spatial dimensions along with the additional dimension of time.<br />
You can think of successive instants in time as stacks of movie frames that form<br />
a 3-D picture of hypertime in the eternitygram. Figure 1.5 is a "timeless" picture<br />
of colliding discs in eternity, an eternity in which all instants of time lie<br />
frozen like musical notes on a musical score. Eternitygrams are timeless.<br />
Hyperbeings looking at the discs in this chunk of spacetime would see past,<br />
present, and future all at once. What kind of relationship with humans could a<br />
creature (or God) have who lives completely outside of time? How could they<br />
relate to us in our changing world? One of my favorite modern examples of<br />
God's living outside of time is described in Anne Rice's novel Memnoch the<br />
Devil. At one point, Lestat, Anne Rice's protagonist, says, "I saw as God sees,<br />
and I saw as if Forever and in All Directions." Lestat looks over a balustrade in<br />
Heaven to see the entire history of our world:<br />
. . . the world as I had never seen it in all its ages, with all its secrets<br />
of the past revealed. I had only to rush to the railing and I could<br />
peer down into the time of Eden or Ancient Mesopotamia, or a<br />
moment when Roman legions had marched <strong>through</strong> the woods of<br />
my earthly home. I would see the great eruption of Vesuvius spill its<br />
horrid deadly ash down upon the ancient living city of Pompeii.<br />
Everything there to be known and finally comprehended, all questions<br />
settled, the smell of another time, the taste of it. . . .<br />
If all our movements <strong>through</strong> time were somehow fixed like tunnels in the<br />
ice of spacetime (as in the eternitygram in Fig. 1.5), and all that "moved" was<br />
our perception shifting <strong>through</strong> the ice as time "passes," we would still see a<br />
complex dance of movements even though nothing was actually moving. Perhaps<br />
an alien would see this differently. In some sense, all our motions may be<br />
considered fixed in the geometry of spacetime, with all movement and change<br />
being an illusion resulting from our changing psychological perception of the<br />
moment "now." Some mystics have suggested that spacetime is like a novel<br />
being "read" by the soul — the "soul" being a kind of eye or observer that<br />
stands outside of spacetime, slowly gazing along the time axis.<br />
Note 8 describes the metamorphosis of time into a spatial dimension<br />
during the early evolution of our universe. At the point when time loses its