Edward Frenkel

We go to realizing that it is round, that it's shaped as a sphere so that we can actually travel around

the Earth.

So there isn't a place where we hit the end, so to speak.

And then proceeding in the same vein, Einstein's general relativity theory tells us that our spacetime is not flat either.

This is much harder to imagine, a bent three-dimensional or four-dimensional space or four-dimensional spacetime, because this idea that the space around us is flat is so deeply entrenched.

And yet we know from this theory and from the experiments that have confirmed it that a ray of light bends around a star as if being attracted by the force of gravity.

But in fact, the force of gravity is the bending.

It's just that it's not only the bending on the space, it's also the bending of space-time.

There is a curvature, not only between spatial dimensions, the way parallels and meridians come together.

In the small scale, they look like perpendicular lines, but if you zoom out, you see that the space are curving the space.

They are sort of the tracks along which the space gets curved.

That would be the curvature of spatial dimensions.

But in fact, now throw in time and one time, imagine a sphere which has one of the meridians correspond to time and the parallels correspond to space.

I can't imagine it, but I can write mathematical formula expressing that curvature.

And in fact, that curvature is responsible for the force of gravity attraction between the sort of simplest instantiation of it, attraction between two planets or between two human beings, for that matter.

There are people who claim that they can, that they possess other ways of experiencing it.

Well, messing with time, but not necessarily messing with time, because one point of view is that, you know, I think, who was it?

I think William Blake-

wrote that eternity loves time production.

So one point of view is that it is eternity which is fundamental, where time stands still, which our mind conceptualizes as the time.