SOME?... "Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space"
In their paper, Sorli and Fiscaletti argue that, while the concepts of special relativity are sound, the introduction of 4D Minkowski spacetime has created a century-long misunderstanding of time as the fourth dimension of space that lacks any experimental support. They argue that well-known time dilation experiments, such as those demonstrating that clocks do in fact run slower in high-speed airplanes than at rest, support special relativity and time dilation but not necessarily Minkowski spacetime or length contraction. According to the conventional view, clocks run slower at high speeds due to the nature of Minkowski spacetime itself as a result of both time dilation and length contraction. But Sorli and Fiscaletti argue that the slow clocks can better be described by the relative velocity between the two reference frames, which the clocks measure, not which the clocks are a part of. In this view, space and time are two separate entities.

“With clocks we measure the numerical order of motion in 3D space,” Sorli told Phys.org. “Time is 'separated' from space in a sense that time is not a fourth dimension of space. Instead, time as a numerical order of change exists in a 3D space. Our model on space and time is founded on measurement and corresponds better to physical reality.”

It's just an assumption of one of authors Amrit Sorli, who is a recognized crackpot***. General relativity describes the universe under a system of field equations, and there exist solutions to these equations that permit what are called "closed time-like curves," and hence time travel into the past. The first of these was proposed just by Kurt Gödel, a solution known as the Gödel metric, but his (and many others') example requires the universe to have physical characteristics that it does not appear to have. So it it's not true, Gödel's vision prohibited the time travel, but exactly the opposite: he just developed a relativity based solution, which explicitly does allow it.

***Thoughts
A crackpot writing in Scienceagogo? No way Hoseay

http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html


Last edited by Mike Kremer; 04/15/12 07:51 PM. Reason: Included SOME (1st word)

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"You will never find a real Human being - Even in a mirror." ....Mike Kremer.