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age when the very nature of time is only beginning to be understood. The concepts of time warps, time travel, and the like are no longer the plaything of fiction writers, but the serious study of particle physicists, cosmologists, and other scientists. So, before we go further in our exploration of hyperspace and UFOs, we need to shed the baggage of some additional misconceptions that may hinder our understanding. While philosophers throughout history have debated almost every idea under the sun since the world began, the one thing that all of them have presumed is that time is linear and absolute. Most of us assume that a minute a thousand years ago is the same as a minute today and that we live in a dimension in which time inexorably rolls onward yet is totally intractable to any attempt to glimpse ahead. We move forward and can look back, but we can't look ahead or move back. (Does anyone "remember" tomorrow?) Traversing the dimension of time remains the ever popular realm of fiction writers—and, apparently, a few strange experiments of the particle physicists.”*' (We explored some speculations concerning "transversible wormholes" in chapter 4.) This linear view of time is exemplified by our frequent resort to "time lines." When we were in school, our teachers would draw a line on the blackboard. The left end of the line might represent the beginning of something—the birth of a person, the founding of a nation, or an era. The right end of the line would mark the termination of that subject— the death of a person or the end of an era. (Now?) Therefore, when we consider the concept of "eternity," we tend to view it as a line of infinite length—from "infinity" on the left and continuing toward "infinity" on the right. When we think of God, we naturally assume that he is someone "with lots of time." But that linear view suffers from the misconceptions of an obsolete physics. Today we owe a great debt to the insights of Dr. Albert Einstein: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." It was the insight of Dr. Albert Einstein, in considering the nature of our physical universe, that we live in more than three dimensions and that time itself is a fourth physical dimension. This insight led to his famous theory of relativity and the discovery that time itself is part of our physical reality. As noted in chapter 4, we live in (at least) a four-dimensional space—that is, the three spatial dimensions of length, width, and height, and the dimension of time.” Time is now known to be a physical property that varies with mass, acceleration, and gravity 131 THE NATURE OF TIME BEGINNING END THE DIMENSIONS OF REALITY