There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our

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Hinton argued that, because of the limitations of human consciousness, we perceive four-dimensional objects as changing three-dimensional objects. Yet reality is really an unchanging, four-dimensional space. What we perceive as time is misperceived space.

British philosopher Victoria Welby, who drew on chronophotography and the fourth dimension to argue that time is literally space. The past is as real as a piece of land we’ve just journeyed through, the future as real as the country waiting ‘below a given horizon’.

Within philosophy, conceiving of time as a line led to thinkers debating the reality of the past and future. Picture a line: all its parts, the fractions of ink that make it up, exist. When we picture time as a line, this leads us to think that all its parts exist too. In the 1870s, the German philosopher Hermann Lotze became anxious about this.... See more