And from the tilted neighbor's point of view it's similar.
Maybe it's easier to first think of two trees that both tilt away from each other.
They were then confused why their measurements of distances always agreed but of position always differed, until someone came up with the rotation equations that allowed one to map day to night and night to day.
Change normal trigonometric rotation to hyperbolic, and you've got most of special rel.
Imagine a hyper-being that has a few more dimensions, looking down on us as we look down on Tao's treefolk. We might optimistically imagine that they see our little moment of conscious perception moving backwards and forwards in time like a motivated fish. We perceive it as one way though, because when our little window of perception moves backwards it enters a state where it cannot remember the future, and when it moves forward it enters a state where it has no reference of lingering unevenly at different past times.
Seems unlikely, but so does everything else.
However, he (and his successors) have had a great deal of trouble reconciling a static universe with quantum mechanics.
(a) as far as I know, "many worlds" is the closest anyone has yet come
(b) luckily there are very few physical problems involving scales that would invoke both GR and QM.
It seems like he came up with the disk idea and then thought 'this looks like a tree' and back-solved Middle-Earth and then was like 'oops, this behaviour is actually trolls' when writing it up (rather adjusting his paper to use stone discs)
I can't imagine there's many people who both get past the opening and don't understand the concept sufficiently for the allegory to be useful.
