It’s as easy as x, y, z.
@melsaskca l’m talking about one singular point.
You mean like the intersection of x, y, and z?
If you’re at the intersection of time and space, it means you are anywhere in spacetime: you exist, will exist, or have existed at some place in the universe. Yes, the “intersection of time and space” is all of spacetime, much like the “intersection of latitude and longitude” is the entire surface of the Earth because that’s the set of points for which both latitude and longitude are defined.
We can put the 4 axes of spacetime (𝑥-, 𝑦-, 𝑧-displacement* and time) anywhere we want to define a point 0 (𝑥=0 m, 𝑦=0 m, 𝑧=0 m, t=0 s) where they meet (and that’s symbolic too, graphs where axes don’t cross at 0 are common and often useful but sometimes purposefully misleading). This is probably what you meant. Astronomers might put it into the infinitesimal universe at the time of Big Bang (and align the space axes to the cosmic microwave background as time passes). Islam scholars might put it on 622-06-16 CE at Kaaba in Mecca. As far as GPS satellites are concerned, the zero point is 1980-01-06 00:00:00 UTC at the center of the WGS-84 ellipsoid (and the space axes are locked to the rotating Earth as time passes).
* Diagrams of spacetime are limited to 1 or 2 space axes because they exist as representations of the 4D concept in space (2D (𝑥𝑦), aka plane, or 3D (𝑥𝑦𝑧)) only.
@ChaoticNeutralCzech could it have been simpler ??
You seem to conflate axes and the quantities they represent. Learn more about graphs.
Now that I have answered the question in a physical way, let me delve into maybe the more philosophical / subjective take on it.
We indeed to live in a sort of crosspoint of time and space. We happen to live on a very habitable planet with endless oceans and breathable air. Life in all forms is abundant. What are the odds that we were born here, and not in one of the many, MANY inhospitable places in the universe? We live in a very, and I mean very, small part of a very large universe, and it’s the only place we can call home.
And at the same time, we are living in an age of technological innovation and scientific discovery. Medicine is more accessible than it was even just 50 years ago, an incredibly short time scale in the eyes of the universe. Wireless networks span the Earth, allowing communication between peoples from across the planet. GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, etc. give us incredibly precise location tracking, supercomputers are in the pockets of so many people, software development has come very far from the days of punch cards, knowledge has never been more widespread (see libraries, the Internet…). We know so much more about the universe, the planet we live on, its geography, the inner workings of life, etc.! We truly are living in the golden age of humanity.
We live in a very precise crosspoint of spacetime, existing in a small blue marble within the vast void of space, living in a time of prosperity and discovery. I believe that we should cherish the brief window of time we call now and the small little part of space we call home.
I’m not sure why people are downvoting your post, it seems like a generally good question, but perhaps worded a little confusingly.
I think it means whoever said it doesn’t understand that it’s all one thing.
(Spacetime.)
Of course I don’t understand spacetime either, so……
@FuglyDuck spacetime is an intriguing word, because time and space are entirely two different concepts… Having different measurement units…
Is there any particular unit for measuring spacetime ?
Graphs of temperature, voltage, air pressure, money etc. over time also use different units for the two axes.
Of course, some graphs do indeed use the same units, for example the cube-shaped RGB space has “1/255 of max subpixel brightness” units on all axes.
@ChaoticNeutralCzech don’t get it
In graphs, how high and how far right a point is describe its properties. Like the phase diagram of water: the further right you are, the higher the temperature, the further up you are, the higher the pressure. At each point, water would be in a certain state, which is plotted on the graph as colored areas.
Axes are markings that only help measure how hot and pressurized a certain point is. You are probably at around 100 kPa (atmospheric pressure) and 295 K (room temperature) so you experience liquid water. Even though the vertical axis is labeled “Pressure”, that does not mean pressure only exists on that line; same for the temperature axis. These meet at absolute zero in near-vacuum. Even though you pr But you might prefer axes at 0 °C (the left vertical red line) and 1 atm (the horizontal red line).
We live in both spatial dimensions (three of them!) as well as a time dimension, which seems to always tick forwards. We don’t know why we never see it tick backwards, all physics we know of work the same way when time is reversed aside from weird weak force shenanigans. This is called time reversal symmetry, and is part of the larger CPT symmetry, which is a topic I have researched before!
C stands for charge conjugation, while P stands for parity. C symmetry is to do with the reversal of the charges of all particles in a system, while P is, in a nutshell, the same process but in a “mirror world”, so a particle with clockwise spin becomes anticlockwise, your left hand becomes your right. Originally, it was thought that C symmetry always holds in the universe, but this was proven to be incorrect due to weak force shenanigans. The same was true with CP invariance, the combination of C and P symmetries thought to always hold, more weak force weirdness led to the breaking of that. This finally led to the theory of CPT invariance, which added time reversal symmetry. This means CP violating processes must also break time reversal symmetry!
C and CP violation is super important for the study of the baryon asymmetry, which, in a nutshell, is the question of why there is more matter (mostly made up of baryons) than antimatter. Our current physics doesn’t have a good explanation for this, since most processes produce and destroy the two equally. C and CP violation would mean antimatter (which has opposite charge to their matter counterparts) can act differently to normal matter, giving rise to an asymmetry between the two. Investigations towards new extended models of physics usually include additional CP violation (in the form of new processes, particles, etc.) for this reason.
Baryons are subatomic particles composed of three quarks. You might have heard of the proton and neutron, which have uud and udd quark configurations respectively, where u is the symbol for the up quark and d is the down quark. Most matter is made up of these baryons.
Electrons are not made of quarks, they are fundamental particles (not made of smaller bits) categorised as leptons. Another lepton you might have heard of is the neutrino, which you might have heard of as the “ghost particles” since they are nearly massless and rarely interact with anything. Because of their ghostlike nature, it is difficult to measure them, which is why focus is directed towards baryon asymmetry over lepton asymmetry.
If there was an equal number of matter and antimatter particles, everything would annihilate and you would be left with only photons. Stars, planets, etc. were all able to form, meaning there must have been some process that created a matter-antimatter asymmetry. And of course, we are made of matter, our existence tells us that some amount of matter must have survived annihilation.
Our measurements of the CMB as well as the abundances of light elements show us that, during the early universe, there was one additional baryon for every million anti-baryons. Without these literal one-in-a-million baryons, no matter would have been left in the universe.
CPT invariance and CP violation is a really interesting topic with very deep implications for how our universe formed. If you are in any way interested in physics or astronomy, I would really recommend reading into it!
Went on a little bit of an off-topic tangent there, but I hope you learned something neat!
If Einstein were to answer this, he would say that every point in spacetime is its very own “crosspoint of time and space”.
In other words…wherever you find yourself, there you are. Everything else is located relative to this.
you live at the crosspoint of time and space ?
Zero. It means you live at point zero.
That’s where the axes meet, the x-axis, and the y and z axis, and the time axis.
Nope.
The question is as nonsensical as “what if you’re on the intersection of latitude and longitude?”, as if longitude only existed on the equator and latitude on the Prime Meridian. All points on Earth have longitude and latitude, and are the intersections of their respective local meridian and local circle of latitude (aka “parallel”). Not necessarily the Prime Meridian and the equator, that’s only for “point zero” of Earth. These lines are often in the center of maps and can be thought of as “axes” but axes only mark values, they aren’t the quantities the values represent.
If you’re at the intersection of time and space, it means you are anywhere in spacetime: you exist, will exist, or have existed at some place in the universe.
The question is as nonsensical
You are right, and therefore there is no complete answer. I have just given one possible Interpretation.
Yes but it should be explained to OP that even though there is an axis labeled “time”, time exists outside that line. The label does not say “here is time” but “this line shows how many seconds away from the reference point any point is based on how far it is in this direction on the diagram”
@Zwuzelmaus what’s point zero ?
what’s point zero ?
You will know it as soon as you read the second line of my comment…
What do YOU mean by “crosspoint of time and space”? Anyone who is alive is always joined with both space and time, as is the nature of space and time. So the phrase “crosspoint of time and space” seems kind of meaningless, as it is a constant and universal state.
@edgemaster72 according to your comment, existence itself ought to be meaningless…
It very much is meaningless to many different philosophies. You’re going to have to learn to accept far more radical interpretations of reality if you’re going to ask such open ended questions.
Lecture about random ghost in the sky in 3, 2, 1 …
What does it mean when you don’t?
Then you are far away from yourself 🔙📡
gentrification!
