Something to think about

Tonight I was reading something that grabbed my attention. I want to share it with you. Any comments will be appreciated.

Consider the following quote:

"Time is an accident consequent upon motion and is necessarily attached to it. Neither of them exists without the other. Motion does not exist except in time, and time cannot be conceived by the intellect except together with motion. And all that with regard to which no motion can be found, does not fall under time."

A brilliant insight from Albert Einstein, perhaps? If you answered "probably," you're only off by about 700 years.

In as much as the above quotation sounds like a 20th century theory of Einstein, it is actually from Maimonides, the great Jewish Torah scholar of the twelfth century. Actually, Einstein and his colleagues probably were inspired by Maimonides' writings, which were well ahead of their time, as you can tell.

The last sentence of Maimonides' quote may actually pertain to God Himself. As "motion" (as well as space) imply measurement and can only apply to physical objects, and as God is not corporeal, then He is not confined by time or space. Time was created by us. God operates beyond time.

TIME AND SPACE IN OUR 3-DIMENSIONAL WORLD

There are many ways that "time" and "space" can be shown to have a relationship. A simple example is found in the game of chess. Chess strategy involves interplay between space (how many of the 64 squares of the board you control), and time (how many moves that you are ahead or behind your opponent). Experienced players often "trade" space for time, having to use their intuition as to whether they are getting the "better end of the deal." Only after a beginner understands this "dimension," of the game, can he move forward to becoming an advanced player.

In mathematics, there are complex equations that cannot be solved without introducing a "4th dimension" (something beyond the X, Y and Z coordinates in 3-dimensional space). Again, without "expanding" beyond the elementary and obvious, one cannot advance to the next level of understanding.

Physics has shown that there are relationships between things like energy and mass, as well as time and space, Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2 (Energy equals mass times the constant of the speed of light, squared) was one of the first to link two such elements. Experiments have been done sending atomic clocks through the atmosphere in different directions, arriving at the same destination at the same moment -- however when the clocks were checked, the times were different, thus showing that speed through space affected time.