ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Monte Davis]

Dave Monroe wrote:

>What would a temporalization of time (or of space, for that
>matter) look like?
>
Like Augustine sez: "When someone asks me what time is, I know the 
answer, but when he asks me to explain it, I no longer know.." There are 
suggestive angles in cosmology/general relativity (arrow of time set by 
a very-low-entropy Big Bang) and quantum theory (wave function collapse, 
decoherence).

Ooops, I did it again: "arrow of time" is pretty damn spatial, too.
 
All I have to contribute in the AtD context is what I've tried to get 
across in assorted Weird Science posts: that contrary to more than a 
century of science-flavored spiritualism and science popularization and 
SF, neither non-Euclidean geometry nor quaternions nor relativity 
provides justification for "time as the fourth dimension" in the sense 
of "past/future is really sorta kinda like up/down, left/right. and 
near/far." Whatever time is, it isn't that.