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Time Revisited A few days ago I raised a question about time which I'll explain again. If we could take a series of 3-D 'snapshots' whilst I'm throwing a ball up in the air, there would be two similar images - one of the ball going up and another when it is coming down. The question was: is there anything in the snapshot that identifies the image as one or the other? The question is analogous to forming a circle from a series of 1-dimensional lines. If the circle is, say, 5cm in diameter, and we build up the circle with lines from the bottom to the top, then there are two lines precisely 3cm long - one towards the bottom and the other towards the top. Is there anything that distinguishes them? The answer, I'm sure, is no - which raises an interesting problem. Let's imagine that we have stopped time at some point when the ball is going up. Why should the next snapshot be of the ball continuing to go up, rather than coming down or disappearing altogether? Going back to our analogy, the position of the lines on the diagram of the circle is determined by the shape, which can only be viewed from a 2-dimensional perspective. Similarly, the status of the 3-dimensional snapshots can only be determined from viewing the 4-dimensional pattern (or shape). The situation is the same when we build a 3-dimensional sphere from 2-dimensional surfaces. In our world, all objects have a shape. These may be regular or irregular, though generally there's a pattern of some kind or another in the shape. If we imagine building the shapes from 2-dimensional surfaces then the surfaces won't be placed at random. Similarly, when we build our 4-dimensional world from 3-dimensional snapshots, the snapshots follow a pattern. If the ball was going up it will follow a pattern. It won't usually simply disappear. In fact, what we call cause and effect is simply a 4 dimensional shape. I'll discuss this further.