Timelike

Timelike is a special way of describing something moving through time. Imagine you are walking down the street. Your movement is happening in both space (moving forward) and time (moving forward in time). This is called spacetime.

If you were standing still, you would only be moving through time. In this case, the direction that you move through time is called the timelike direction. It's like a timeline, where time is the only thing that’s moving.

Scientists often use the term timelike to describe a certain type of path or direction that an object can take through spacetime. If an object is traveling timelike, it means it's moving through time, but not necessarily through space. It might be staying in one place, or moving a little bit back and forth, but it's still going forward in time.

People use the concept of timelike paths to help explain things like time travel and the behavior of light near black holes. Understanding timelike paths is a really important part of how we study the universe around us.