Shhhhhh if you’re too loud, someone will try to monetize it
Regular time is imaginary! That’s what’s differentiate time from space. Well assuming it was Minkowski spacetime they were talking about.
Come on, this has been a thing for the last 19+12i years
You can have as many dimensions as you want, just keep taking the integral
You can make as many dimensions as you want as long as you clean them up when youre done
You can only build one megastructure at a time
Imaginary time are used by a lot of companies in form of your unpaid overtimes
yhea, but then you get paid in imaginary money
I’m still trying to understand perpendicular time
A particle is also a wave, a wave moves back and forth between -X and X passing 0 every time.
Now, when you measure this particle and it happens to be at zero, sometimes it moves towards X afterwards and sometimes it moves towards -X.
For the scientists however, all they can measure is that it’s at 0 and half the time it randomly goes one way or the other with 50/50 probability.
To explain this, scientists imagine the particle has more than 0, but it has a secret momentum hidden into it telling it to deflect positively or negatively.
Imagine a circle instead of a line. Now instead of crossing zero, you rotate around 0 and hit a Y and -Y axis with X and -X unchanged.
That y axis that contains the hidden momentum of the particle is called “imaginary” because scientists love loaded terms that are unhelpful to understanding lol.
Why are they rotating it? I almost understood until you got there
If you think about a number line, multiplying 2 by -1 takes you to -2. Multiply it again by -1 and its back at 2.
If you think of the arrow from 0 to 2, all you did was rotate that arrow by 180 degrees to point along the negative axis and back again.
Multiplication by -1 is already a rotation of 180 degrees!
All were doing now is extending that concept to 90 degrees by imagining a second line perpendicular to the original number line.
Two 90 degree rotations need to get to -1 to complete the 180 degree rotation we already expect in normal multiplication.
Giving it the symbol i, this means definitionally i * i = -1. It has to because -1 flips us around the other way on the number line.
That means i is the square root of negative 1.
Any values that use i to store information, even time, could be called “imaginary time”. Really it’s just constantly oscillating between the real and imaginary spaces like a constantly spinning arrow.
Thanks for this! I think it’s the clearest visualization explanation I’ve ever heard for i
waves are related to circles: if you have a line and anchor it at one end, when you rotate it the other end of the line, it draws a circle, but if the paper you’re drawing it on moves to one side at a constant speed, you’ll get a wave. Alternatively, if you plot where the other end of the line is as time passes (for example, every second or every minute), you’ll get a wave. you can do this in reverse too.
it’s helpful to convert to circles. from a regular wave, at 0 you don’t know if the wave will go up or down without further information. 0 on a circle will correspond to one of two spots, either the very top or the very bottom, and if you know which direction the circle is rotating, you can tell what the related wave will do next.
at least that’s my understanding
The easiest way I can explain it is like this: All the sci-fi geeks in the world are familiar with parallel timelines, right? The idea that there’s another RymrgandsDaughter out there living in a world where apes with goatees are the “people” but otherwise pretty much everything else is very similar to how things are for us here and now. But like in perpendicular time, nearly everything is completely different than this current timeline, and yet somehow there’s a point within where I, Gooberear, took the time out of my morning to completely make up this explanation from thin air and which has no basis in actual fact or reality. The end.
Damn I wanna meet this ape goatee woman now
Something something nineteen ninety eight
you can have imaginary anything. just imagine it! i especially like imaginary unicorns
For clarity, are you imagining imaginary unicorns or just regular non-imaginary unicorns?
Oh, you can interpretate anti-matter as either matter that has negative energy and travels forward in time, or matter with positive energy that travels backwards in time, and both interpretation are valid under Dirac’s equation.
I think you mean charge not energy.
Oh, that’s the guy with the private lake, right?
It also works that the exact position of an object could also be complex so an imaginary and real location.
TBF imaginary time is a math trick and not something that actually progresses. It lets us apply results from statistical physics to quantum field theory through a Wick rotation.
So true king.
Yeah, duh!
It lets us apply results from statistical physics to quantum field theory through a Wick rotation.
That sounds like Geordi’s plan to save the Enterprise.
we need a pause, then have them explain it in an easy metaphor.
I now want to see a TNG/John Wick crossover.
the baddies killed his Tribble
John Wick taking down Moriarty and crew, because they got off the freaking holodeck again, and killed his new dog.
Edit: that doesn’t work. I can’t see Moriarty killing a dog. Maybe Genghis Kahn was working with him?
You’ve got to route it through the deflector dish.
Or AI slop trained on Geordi
And you’re trying to tell me that’s not a magic spell you just said? Pfff
A huge portion of Americans aren’t sure the earth is round and ‘idiocracy’ is fictional.
I’m okay with the more esoteric things being reserved for those who can comprehend them.
Can people please realize that saying Idiocracy is a documentary is agreeing with eugenicists
People living in a society that de-prioritizes and under-funds public education:
Is this the result of Undesirables breeding?Fallen into several arguments in Lemmy about exactly that. People give it way too much credence to what is functionally a eugenicist’s nightmare. I have no hard feelings at Mike Judge or even the movie really, but it’s fiction, not a warning from the future. Honestly, people need to stop treating fiction as documentary evidence in general. At best it’s interesting thought experiments, not something one should base their world view on.
All potential realities of time are happening at once, you are just perceiving one slice of it.
If it makes you feel any better - ALL “time” is imaginary. Time is a human construct that has no meaning outside of human endeavor.
Time is as imaginary as up/down, left/right, forward/backward.
That is to say that the concept and it’s consequences exist no matter what we call it. Time is not a human thing, it’s one of the dimensions of the space in which we exist. Calling it “time” and a “second” being as many vibrations of a caesium as it is, that’s the human bit.
Time is a human construct designed for measuring and scheduling and has no meaning whatsoever outside of human endeavor.
The universe and the infinite space the universe resides in exist at “now” : an important tenet of ‘relativity’. No past. No future. Now. Past, future, time… these are constructs of sentient organisms. The universal “don’t believe everything you think” immediately comes to mind.
We exist in space. Space is infinite - it has no boundaries or edges, has always existed and will always exist. We also exist in this (“our”) universe - which is finite, did have a start date, and will come to an end someday. Not soon. Hopefully.
Space is also infinite “bigger” and “smaller”. But let’s save that for another time.
(but does cesium REALLY vibrate the same in different parts of space? h’mm?)
It vibrates relatively the same, depending on how much of it there is nearby. ;)
I guess the tauon decays of its own volition then.
I know I do
My quick guess would be that this a theory that explain some weird phenomenon we don’t have a good explanation for yet. Like how we observe that stars and galaxies don’t orbit as they should and then say that there is “dark mass” which is responsible.
It’s a math trick. Not a physical theory.
Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.
I couldn’t conceive of such a thing!
-i•t
