Visualizing worlds, and the flow of time

I love time charts. They convey so much, so simply. This is how I see the world. It is why I like comics (but not modern decompressed comics): art and words can convey information more efficiently than any other way.

Original link. For a while I did not like XKCD: like most comics it has a tendency to be shallow. But producing a masterpiece like this restores the balance. (Yes, I see the irony of being deep by analyzing movies.)

This also shows how it can be more useful to consider time statically, rather than as moving.

It is worth noticing that while to us time appears to flow, we share the universe with other structures and particles. To them, time and space are just something we humans imagine because we cannot cope with the reality.

Most of the universe is filled with photons of light. To us they seem to be travelling through time But to the photons, who massively outnumber us, time does not flow. As Einstein showed, at what we see as the speed of light, time stretched to infinity and distance shrinks to nothing. To the photons that hit your eye, this is still the singularity at the start of the big bang. What we see as space and time they just see as numbers. And so do we: our brains simply interpret data as a physical world because it makes the world easier to understand.