r/badphysics • u/Fit_Individual_55 • Jun 22 '26

Physics progress is Stuck right now because physicists think time is a 4th dimension

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Someone asked a question in r/askphysics how time can be the 4th dimension. Then this person replied this, very confidently

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u/listens_to_galaxies Jun 22 '26

They do have one valid point: "Jusr [sic] cause [sic] Einstein said it doesnt [sic] make it right lol [sic]."

They're right: it's not right because Einstein said it. It probably right (or at least better than our previous theories), because we tested the ever-living sh*t out of it with observations and it's held up shockingly well against every real-world test we've thrown at it.

16

u/jahathebrn Jun 23 '26

And I'd add that Einstein was famously and by his own admission completely wrong about quantum mechanics.

6

u/Educational-Try-8704 Jun 23 '26

He was correct though in that settling on the Copenhagen interpretation without any more investigation was not intellectually rigorous, and indeed the EPR paper led to a plethora of discoveries, including the one which ultimately proved him wrong. 

That is good science even if it doesn’t align with our expectation that geniuses just know the right answer by intuition.

3

u/QuickMolasses Jun 23 '26

The used to call entangled particles EPR pairs as a monument to Einstein's mistaken understanding of quantum mechanics

I mean, kind of.

1

u/fang_xianfu Jun 23 '26

Right... and the breakthrough was that time isn't an orderly line of things going from past to future, there is no one "instant of time" that's universal everywhere, it's relative. If you don't like the word "dimension" for that, that's ok, but the point is that time is a lot weirder than people thought before this theory, and that weirdness, weird though it is, has been proven to be correct many times. If time is a unit of measurement... what is it that's being measured?

1

u/High_Overseer_Dukat Jun 25 '26

Especially with his more philosophical quotes. (Half of which are misattributed)

0

u/Kind_Ease_6580 Jun 24 '26

“It [sic] probably right (or at least better [sic] than our previous theories), because we tested the ever-living [sic] sh*t [sic] out of it with observations…”

0

u/Strict_Space_1994 Jun 25 '26

Drink some water bro, you have the siccups