There is nothing that exists that is not three dimensional. Whether it is a cell, a molecule, an atom, an electron, a quark, lepton, gluon, muon, tauon, boson, whatever, they all have height, length and width. There is no such thing as a one or two dimensional object. Nothing can exist without a measurement in all three directions, even if the measurement is Planck's Length. According to theory, nothing smaller than Planck's Length can be measured, therefore nothing can exist beyond it.
If nothing can exist without all three dimensions, then to label the measurements as dimensions is meaningless, since they cannot be extracted from one another. Mathematical abstractions don't count. To use an hypothetical one-dimensional 'point' in space may be useful in theoretical calculations, but in the real Universe, there is no such thing. If you remove all but one dimension from an object, it ceaases to exist. Mind games, such as Flatland are fun to explore as mental calisthenics, but in our reality, these are only abstractions.
When we come to time, we are in far greater trouble to call this a dimension. With the first three, we can point in the direction of their vectors. We can measure them with objective instruments. We can move freely among them. But with time, none of these properties exist.
Time is nothing more than our arbitrary means of separating past, present and future. A clock is not an objective measuring device. No matter how accurate it is, the settings and readings are arbitrarily set by someone at some random starting point. Time has no vector. You cannot point in the direction of time. And if time is relative, then it most certainly is not a real thing in our real Universe.
A day is not an objective measure. It is a measure of Earth's position/coordinates in space from when the Sun is overhead to when it is overhead again. A year is nothing more than measuring Earth's coordinates in space from an arbitrary point until the Earth returns to that point again. The numbers we assign to those concepts can and do vary all the time, and they are not the same elsewhere in the Universe. A Martian day is nearly an hour longer than on Earth, and a Venusian day is longer than its year. A year on Pluto has not passed since the American Revolution.
Conversely, kilometer on Earth would be the same on Mars, or anywhere else in the Universe, but time is subjective. As Father Einstein himself observed, when you go to the carnival with a beautiful girl, and hour seems like a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove, a minute seems like an hour. You cannot go in the direction of the future, then change your mind and go back to the past. The concept of time is truly meaningless, while space is full of fixed points.
When it comes down to it, time is nothing more than measurements of distances traveled: the rotations and orbits of masses in space. If you could completely stop an object's motion, time would cease to exist for it, since there would be no way to measure it passing except with subjective and arbitrary devices like clocks. The only way time could exist for the stopped object is to measure changing distances to some other object. Therefore, time is nothing more than movement along one of the spacial axes/dimensions.
At this point, we have dismissed time as a dimension. That is a meaningless concept. When it comes to spacial dimensions, one cannot be separated from the other; no coordinate can ever be zero because for something to exist, it must have coordinates in three dimensions. As for higher spacial dimensions, they may exist, but if you read Flatland (link above) you will realize that we can never experience them, much less point in their directions. They are meaningless in a real world.
To further beat home the point, modern physics has speculated endlessly on something called "space-time" for the past century, as if there is proof that this imaginary fabric of the Universe actually exists. It doesn't. It is a fabrication of Relativity Theory in order to visualize something being warped by gravity. In this concept, gravity is not a force but a result of objects falling into rubber sheets.
In fact, there is no "space-time." The Universe is a vast collection of coordinates filled with a 'foam' of neutrinos, akin to stem cells of reality, which are the being the building blocks of all we perceive. Gravity is nothing more than a complex form of static electricity, pushing and pulling on objects like magnetic poles - like repel, opposites attract.
The Universe is really quite simple and comprehensible if you strip away all the mythical and mystical mumbo-jumbo that has formed a scum on the pond of clear thinking these past 100 years. You can experience the Universal fundamentals by strumming a guitar, watch waves at the beach, playing with magnets, or sticking you finger in a light socket. Everything else is little more than an attempt to mystify us mortals, thus requiring a priesthood of scientists to interpret Life's Great Secrets for us. In other words, nothing more than a new religion.
When we strip away all the magical incantations and mystical mathematics that the Einseinian priesthood has foisted on us, we find the the Universe is conceptually and functionally simple and pure. Vibrations, electricity and magnetism explain all we can experience, and all of it can be measured objectively in all parts of the Universe.
It's time taxpayers demand an end to the "grant money trough." It's not that I oppose scientific inquiry, or supporting real science, but the system currently in place is nothing more than a means of political control over science to maintain the accepted mythology at the expense of real understanding. Taxpayers have shouldered the burden of massive boondoggles, such as LHC and other billion-dollar scams to find things that don't exist. If experiments cannot be translated into technology that improves humanity's lot, then stop throwing huge bales of tax money at them. A Higgs boson or a Gravity Wave (neither of which exist) will not result in any usable information that can transform our daily lives.
It's time we stop worshipping "authority." Neil DeGrsse Tyson has no more idea what he is talking about than you do. We must realize that each of us has the sense and ability to understand the Universe. It's just a matter of opening our minds.
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