Spacelike Time: Candle #153 – 8 hours 17 minutes 11 seconds in 5.5 meters
Spacelike Time: Candle #153 – 8 hours 17 minutes 11 seconds in 5.5 meters
The laws of physics are symmetric, and time is a dimension akin to the spatial dimensions.
A candle marks a duration from the moment of its lighting to the moment it burns out. But in physics, all the laws and interactions played forward work identically played backward—each moment of the candle burning is seamlessly connected to the next and the previous, and the laws that iterate between them work the same in either direction. This means that time is just another dimension like the three spatial dimensions. You don’t think of something three feet behind you as forever lost—it is just behind you, still existing. In the same way, something eight hours ago is, in a sense, always there. We think here of time not as a substance that flows, but a coordinate system that things and events exist in, equivalent to spatial coordinates. This is the block universe model.
If you take the perspective of “nowhere/nowhen” outside of our universe looking in, you can imagine all space and all time as one eternal thing. No past or present, no unfolding, no free-will, no randomness—everything in every state it will take as one thing. As we perceive our past, the candle has burned out, but from this eternalist perspective, it always is.
This image is composed of 1,194 time-lapse images of a candle burning from start to finish programmatically combined to create a single depiction of the unfolding of time in space. This image is printed 15 inches tall and about 18 feet wide.
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