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7:15

(In »Intensities and phenomena in a relationalist universe«)

It looks seductively elegant in mathematics when time is added to the three space dimensions and space–time arises. However, there is no scientific proof outside mathematics that time is some kind of space; rather it is strictly speaking only the mathematical elegance that makes it tempting to believe that this is the case. Even if a phenomenon actually can be registered in space, and even if space can be mathematically expanded by a temporal dimension – which attractively enough enables the construction of a more complex geometry in order to describe various phenomena in even greater detail – there is still nothing that indicates that time really is a fourth dimension of space, ontologically rather than just mathematically. For example, we can travel both up and down and forwards and backwards in space (in relation to an arbitrarily chosen or imagined point). But even if we are travelling forwards in time at various speeds at various places in space, which Einstein proves that we can do, we are invariably still only moving in one single direction along the arrow of time. There is no evidence that anything anywhere in the Universe actually can travel backwards in time. Varying speeds do not automatically imply different directions.