Einstein was talking about Real Time not Imaginary Time

I think Imaginary Time has the right name and it's connected to our Imagination, thoughts and ideas which are not bound by 3 dimensional space or time. Our minds are non local and this is what makes us human. We can look at the world in a holistic way because our imagination can put 2 and 2 together so to speak. So we can see trees and our imagination can construct a house out of these trees. We can move to a new city and we can imagine ourselves living in that new city before we get there.

Einstein was talking about time that's a consequence of space. If you have length, width and depth then you have time because objects are at different locations in space. So the past and the future is just like 1st street and 4th Street. Just two locations in space and it takes time to go from one location to the next location. So space and time are intertwined and time is relative to your position in space. Are you in motion and what's the gravity like in your area of spacetime? This is why gravity can distort time. Gravity isn't distoring anything that's flowing. It distorts space, therefore it distorts the distance bettween objects in space which is time.

Imaginary time is different than real time. Hawking said:

One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there's another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time.

Oh the irony.

Hawking an atheist might have inadverdently discovered what we call the Higher Self. This Higher Self is most likely an extenstion into a 4th dimension of space. So our minds can look at the third dimension from a 4 dimensional perspective or from outside itself.

Our human dodies don't have any sense perception of this higher dimension so it's hard to visualize or describe in 3 dimensional terms. It's like a 2 dimensional being would move and extend into the 3rd dimension even though their body would not have any sense perception of a 3rd dimension. So if a 2 dimensional being was carried into the 3rd dimension, it would think it was in wonderland. The same for 3 dimensional beings and a trip to the 4th dimension might be called mystical or a near death experience that's hard to describe.

The mind is not bound by spacetime, so there has to be an extra dimension of space or the mind is the ground state of being that looks at the world outside of space or time.

Great post. This is the best explanation for time I have seen.

reply to post by Matrix Rising




Spot on !! Exactly how I feel

You ever heard of time slips, where people have seen roman soldiers marching down the street?







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This was really interesting, a really great read for my lunch break. I suggest reading a book called Hyperspace, by michio kaku, it is a fantastic book and goes in depth into the physics behind wormholes, hyperspace. and explains the dimensions as well =). And examples of taking a flatlander (2d) and putting them into a 3d world. Its pretty neat.

i hope one day we can develop an experiment to be able to tap into this and actually verify it , while were at it perhaps discovery other dimensions that are out of the blue to the theory.




"You ever heard of time slips, where people have seen roman soldiers marching down the street?"


would love to see some sources for this . I would expect this sort of "event" to occur alot more , and should be able to detect ....

thats of course if you think human eyes can observe such a time clash ? or dimension clash?

reply to post by northEASTukPIMPStheSYSTEM


Yes, I heard of time slips and you make a good point.

Time Slips would mean nature creates energy that distorts our spacetime so a person will see Roman Times or 1920 for a split second. This would be an amazing discovery.

It would mean Time Travel is possible but you wouldn't have to travel anywhere so it would essentially be a Time Shift. This is because you would be shifting your perception of time and you could do this in your own backyard.

Time Shifters could be walking around as we speak. They would be surrounded by some serious energy so they would probably be in some sort of space suit or they're sitting in their living room and walking around our spacetime through some sort of Avatar.

We would essentially be able to watch the past on DVD.

reply to post by Azure Sky


I've read Hyperspace by Dr. Kaku and I like to read and watch all of hys Physics books and TV programs. I also like Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. This season has been really good.

reply to post by seedofchucky


Thanks for the videos and I will check them out. Flatland is one of my favorite stories.

There is no real time without a clock to measure it, that's why time truly is an arbitrary illusion. What we humans are experiencing is a subjective delayed time', so all events reaching our cognition are really a stale pre filtered delayed reality. I think Einstein was talking about the relative nature of how atomic clocks cycle.

Imaginary numbers are simply numbers involving the the square root of negative numbers. A complex number is composed of a real component and an imaginary component, where the real axis is horizontal and the imaginary is vertical by convention. I'm guessing by imaginary time they mean time which has an imaginary component.

Imaginary numbers are as real as real numbers in the sense that it is another abstraction which is useful. The only numbers that truly exist in reality are natural numbers.

Hope this helps dispels much of the mysticism on the topic.

reply to post by 547000


That's one of the things I think could use some improvement...they really choose bad words to use to label certain things in science. Calling it 'imaginary' just leads to all sorts of retorts.

I'm not sure if 2 temporal dimensions is going to end up being correct in the long run, however. It gives us more accurate measurements for things at present, but I think there's probably going to be a lot more discovered about the dimensions of time in the future. I could throw some ideas about it out there, but as I have no real math to back it, it can only ever be a pet theory regardless of how much more sense it seems to make.

It really doesn't matter what term you use, in popular teminology it will get butchered horribly. For example, most people think of dimension as something mystical when a little Linear Algebra clarifies what it actually means in real world science.

You could argue imaginary is a fit label. There's no number you can think of when it's squared that is less than zero. But mathematicians extended the concept of number to include such hypothetical numbers, supposing such a number did exist. Then again one could also argue that negative numbers are imaginary too because there is no such thing as a length less than zero. But they just associated a direction to resolve this issue.

Originally posted by Bordon81
There is no real time without a clock to measure it, that's why time truly is an arbitrary illusion. What we humans are experiencing is a subjective delayed time', so all events reaching our cognition are really a stale pre filtered delayed reality. I think Einstein was talking about the relative nature of how atomic clocks cycle.

I'm not sure what point you were trying to make. Humans perceive time in 2 ways:
By measuring the passage of time with a clock.
By experiencing what they perceive to be the passage of time without a clock.

There are several interesting experiments on this.
In one experiment, younger and older people are evaluated for their relative passage of time. In the experiment, 5 minutes is the same amount of time for the younger and the older person according to the clock. But the older person perceives the 5 minutes to pass by much more quickly than the younger person does. These findings seem to confirm that our internal "clocks" slow down as we age making time appear to us to pass more quickly.

The other experiment is even more fascinating. In some cases people can make reasonable time estimates, but in other cases they can be off wildly showing a huge disparity between the passage of time according to the clock, and the human perception of the passage of time:

mcadams.posc.mu.edu...

One study involving a simulated bank robbery even resulted in witnesses describing a thirty second event as having taken fifteen minutes

Neither of those types of time are imaginary, they are perceived by humans.

Imaginary time is not perceived by humans. It's a mathematical construct.

Originally posted by 547000
I'm guessing by imaginary time they mean time which has an imaginary component.

Imaginary numbers are as real as real numbers in the sense that it is another abstraction which is useful.

You guessed correctly:

Imaginary time

Imaginary time is difficult to visualize. If we imagine "regular time" as a horizontal line running between "past" in one direction and "future" in the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in the complex plane. However, imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up — it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience.

Imaginary numbers used by electrical engineers are very real, as they are used in power factor calculations. The way you know it's real is, you literally have to add generating capacity to make up for the power factor calculated with the imaginary numbers which is physically observed in your electric usage when you start to operate a bunch of motors. It's a little confusing to understand if you don't work with imaginary numbers but I have and they seem pretty real to me since I can prove the manifestation of how I use them in the real world, as in the example just cited. Imaginary time is analogous.

Originally posted by 547000
It really doesn't matter what term you use, in popular teminology it will get butchered horribly. For example, most people think of dimension as something mystical when a little Linear Algebra clarifies what it actually means in real world science.

You're right, it would be a little bit confusing if you called it anything else too. The problem for most people is we can't imagine a number that multiplied by itself results in negative one. That's got to seem strange to most people by any name. But it's a great mathematical tool as you said.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
By experiencing what they perceive to be the passage of time without a clock.

Really, when you think about it, that is almost impssible to achieve. Anything can be a clock. A clock is just a physical process that we que off of to sense the passage time. This could be a super accurate atomic clock, the sensation of our own heart beat, or clouds moving in the sky, to just about anything else. Unless you acheived complete and total sense depirvation you will always have a clock, albeit perhaps an extremely innaccurate one.

Then, of course, our own thoughts can cause problems, so you would probably need some sort of meditative state induced too. Although, total sense deprivation would probably help with that.

Interestingly enough, some Buddhist monks, amonsgt other folks, who are reportedly able to block, or "ignore", their senses, do report different states of consciousness where time doesn't have as much meaning. They can meditate for hours, and it might as well been 5 minutes.

So, how does time behave in the 4th dimension? I was watching Through the Wormhole, and they were talking about how gravity is so much weaker here in our dimension and that it must be much stronger in the other dimensions. Well, if gravity warps space-time, then if gravity is much stronger in the 4th dimension, like around the strength of the weak nuclear force, then wouldn't this warp space-time, as well? Could it warp it so much that traveling from one side of the universe to the other would happen almost instantaneously?