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.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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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.
You've got to route it through the deflector dish.
we need a pause, then have them explain it in an easy metaphor.
Or AI slop trained on Geordi
And you’re trying to tell me that’s not a magic spell you just said? Pfff
So true king.
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Plot twist: all time is imaginary time.
*stares at clock*
"I know your secrets you little dippo"
Lunchtime doubly so.
Ever had a pan-galactic gargleblaster?
I read this book when I was an innocent kid and therefore completely missed the genius of
"What's so bad about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."
(It's been a long time, might be paraphrasing unintentionally)
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It's rather like having your head caved in by a lemon wrapped around a gold brick
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I keep running out of regular time already, now you tell me I need to keep track of perpendicular time?
Yeah but it's easy, just take the sine of regular time and you're set.
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Imaginary time are used by a lot of companies in form of your unpaid overtimes
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 tried to get multiple physicists to help me mine this imaginary time, but they all said that it was "impossible" and that it's "not how time works" or something.
I guess people just really don't want to jump on this money-making bandwagon.
Just keeping asking until someone (a go getter) gives you the answer you want.
Come on, this has been a thing for the last 19+12i years
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.
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
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I'm still trying to understand perpendicular time
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.
Something something nineteen ninety eight
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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
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
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I couldn't conceive of such a thing!
-i•t
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?
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All potential realities of time are happening at once, you are just perceiving one slice of it.
Regular time is imaginary! That's what's differentiate time from space. Well assuming it was Minkowski spacetime they were talking about.
Shhhhhh if you're too loud, someone will try to monetize it
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.
It also works that the exact position of an object could also be complex so an imaginary and real location.