Time and Space

A while back I blogged about Einstein's speculation on the nature of time, and I've just come across this explanatory episode of Horizon. Among other things, it is revelatory thought to me that I see the objects around me as they were in the past, albeit nanoseconds. I suppose one could work out the exact time based on the fact that light takes eight minutes to travel from the sun, which is 150 million kilometres away. Following on from this line on thought, if by photographing space, we are capturing galaxies as they were billions of years ago, is it possible, with a deep enough field, to photograph the very inception of the universe? Best part of the programme? Meeting the 'Director of Time'. Cool.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fyl5z/Horizon_Do_You_Know_What_Time_It_Is/

If time is only really a forth dimension of space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in time as we move about in the other dimensions of space?

You know how, on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four, if they could master the perspective of the thing.

HG Wells, The Time Machine

The presenter of the Horizons episode was Dr. Brian Cox, who is part of the group of scientists who developed the Hadron Collider. Here he is explaining it in simple words for numpties like myself.