clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

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