Alex McColgan

It then becomes easy to see that changing our direction comes about by decelerating with one of our values and accelerating with the other.

We don't have to change both values though.

Let's just give ourselves a little impetus in the x direction.

Obviously, the more we are pushed, the faster we are going to travel, and the more our total vector begins to lean towards a perfect horizontal line.

The size of our vector increases.

However, let's say that we want to go faster.

In fact, we want to go so fast that we are no longer travelling in the y direction, and are only moving in the x direction, or space.

Is there any amount of push we can get in the x direction that will make it so that we are actually going completely horizontally?

No.

You could increase the distance in x by a larger and larger amount, but as long as y has some value, you will never actually get that vector perfectly going across space.

The only way you could get your vector in the time direction to slow down is if you pushed against something that's ahead of you, or pulled on something behind you.

But if everything near you is in the same second you are in, there's nothing to push against.

You can only push each other left or right.

Nothing is ahead or behind.

Interestingly, with only this available to you, your vector can trend closer and closer to flat, but it never actually reaches it.

And increasing your speed produces diminishing returns on how much flatter you can get your vector.

You have a limit.

you would essentially need to go infinite speed to approximate a flat line, and to go infinite speed, you would need infinite energy.

Difficult to get your hands on.

Of course, this is where the idea diverges from reality.