“There are really four dimensions,” begins the narrator of The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s classic Victorian adventure novel. “Three which we call the three planes of space and a fourth, time.” Humans cannot help but think of time as somehow different, perhaps because, as the narrator muses, we continuously move in one direction along it from the beginning to the end of our lives.
This limitation affects how we see nature. We can fail to appreciate that, for living things struggling to survive, environmental conditions change through both space and time. Consider a plant growing on a windswept mountain versus a sheltered valley, or in the gentle summer sun versus the height of winter. To survive, animals and plants must adapt to all four dimensions of their environment.
