BACK TO:

I want you, for a minute, to stop and ask yourself, "What is time?" Time flows forward for everyone (at rest relative to one another) at the same speed. It never moves backward. Why? Atoms of the same nature decay or oscillate at the same rate no matter how many separate atoms are observed. In essence, they all move through time at the same pace. How? It is indeed puzzling when thought about. Obviously, it has no color, no taste, and no smell. It is not detected by our ordinary senses. We can not see it, yet we are aware that time is constantly passing us, or inversely, that we are traveling through time. Although we cannot describe the precise nature of time, there is still no question in our minds that in the world around us, there is indeed some entity, phenomenon, condition, or universal property that is part of the orderly nature of existence. We call it time.

The passage of time seems to be a strictly one-way affair. We can turn our clocks back one hour if we wish but we are incapable of moving even one second back in time.

Einstein's theory of relativity introduced a startling paradox with regard to the passage of time. Incredible as it seemed, the relativity theory contended that time might move faster for one observer than another taking the measurement. Relativity even contended that events that seemed to occur simultaneously to one observer could be seen by another separated by distinct, measurable intervals of time. How is it possible that the very biological time clock which determines the aging of cells, and indeed of all atoms, would actually slow down under certain circumstances. Time has been proven to change along with an object of linear dimensions and mass when it is accelerated to extremely high velocities.

Although we can visualize the three spatial dimensions without difficulty, this curious "temporal dimension" differs from ours in the respect that it cannot be visualized in space. Nor is that the only difficulty we encounter when attempting to compare a linear dimension of "distance per second through time" with the three spatial dimensions. Perhaps the most awkward and glaring difference of all lies in the fact that an object can be moved quite readily in either direction in the first three dimensions, but only moves one way in time. Please correct me if I'm wrong but if time really is a fourth linear dimension, or behaves like one, then why cant an object be moved back and forth through time at will, just as a salt shaker could be moved across a table or up into the air?

As I have stated, time appears to be analogous to a fourth linear dimension; a dimension which is clearly not oriented the same way as any of the three physical dimensions. Nevertheless, if time is a linear dimension, we can conclude that an object's motion through time must occur in some direction. Even if we cannot quite visualize it because of the three-dimensional limitation on our brains, an object moving on a time-track must be regarded as having a vector in time; in our case, forward.

My answer to why everything, from galaxies to subatomic particles, is moving forward in time at a fixed velocity is simple. Using the same equations of relativity that explains motion through three dimensions also applies to the fourth. Let me explain: Take an object, lets say a grain of sand, and accelerate it to just a hair under light speed. Its mass would have increased enormously so that a comparatively enormous amount of energy would be required in order to reverse its direction. It would then require infinite energy to reach the speed of light due to the energy-mass conversions (the energy required to accelerate even a small amount would increase exponentially). If the object could be accelerated to the speed of light, there would be no way to slow it down, because if an infinite amount of energy was used to speed it up, there would be none left to slow it. Its motion through that dimension would have become irreversible.

The reason that no object has ever been reversed in its motion through time is that there is not enough energy in the universe to reverse time's flow. Everything is hurtling through time at roughly 186,282 miles per second. The fact that nothing has ever been observed moving from the present to either the future or the past further serves to prove that Einstein was right in computing light sped as the ultimate speed limit. Nothing can move faster than light in either the three spatial dimensions or time.
br> Although this theory is un testable at least with our present technology, we may some day in the future be able to determine it. Only time will tell.

Clarification Point--
The reason time's influence is less at high velocities is because all three spatial dimensions are oriented differently than the flow of time. Any speed in any direction opposes that flow. The physical speeds cancel each other out (ex. an object moving at 100,000 miles per second would only move through time at 86,282 miles per second from the object's point of view).