The deep insight of Einstein’s work was that we can convert matter to energy (hence the Manhattan project). And Flatland is such a famous book for suggesting how to think about different dimensionalities. You’re suggesting that there would be a similar conversion equation for time to space. And something similar runs through various stories about time travel (e.g. A Wrinkle in Time’s tesseract). “Not ‘where are we’ but ‘when are we’” etc.

For me, it seems silly to assume we _have_ to move forward through time (and at a constant rate, no less!). It’s in fact counter to some experiences, akin to de-ja-vu. Sensing things that occur much later — connections out of linear temporal order, or looped together through an additional temporal dimension.

There’s enough anecdotal evidence, and the reward would be so astoundingly great, that it’s silly to ignore the possibility. But there’s so little to draw from. Faint, infrequent cues. Where to look and how to approach it systematically remains elusive.

One minor question would be whether the ripple is in three temporal dimensions (a sphere), or two or one: time’s arrow. I’m not a physicist and know little about it, but I gather that string theory does posit several more dimensions, in which the strings oscillate and vibrate.

The framework of relativity is the four-dimensional Minkowski space-time. Again, I gather it does well to describe relativistic motion in our physical world. But I’ve never been convinced that we, the western scientists, truly understand time in any gut-level, intuitive sense. Our models match well with the realities we observe and are decent predictors, but there’s something missing. The closest we get is perceptual stretching, subdividing temporal space by attentive focus. Seems like we’re blind to a phase-shift, stepping sideways, out of the arrow’s trajectory. Dancing in the space of time, hips and all.