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by taylodl 375 days ago
> The key insight is that everything moves through spacetime at speed c

That's the key error in thinking. The key insight of special relativity is there is no such thing as absolute time or absolute space. You have a perception of your passage of time and moving through space, but it differs from other observers in other inertial frames. There's simply no way to say what your "real" passage of time and movement through space is - that's a meaningless concept. Therefore there is no distribution of your velocity between time and space.

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But there is absolute spacetime. Observers will disagree about distance between events in space or time, but they will all agree on the value of the Minkowski metric that includes space and time.
And they'll all disagree on your spatial velocity and how much time has passed for you. The only thing they'll agree on is the spacetime interval between any two events, calculated using the Minkowski metric. That's a fundamental invariant, but it's not absolute spacetime in the sense of a fixed, unchanging background. Instead, it highlights that space and time themselves are relative to the observer's motion.