Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000
Phenomenization IV Imaginary Time
Tangible phenomena readily submit to measurement with so-called ’real’ numbers. Thus, for example, we can have four apples, or minus four apples, if we happen to owe you four. Although time has little tangibility, we persist in measuring it with real numbers, even though for advanced scientific purposes we get better results by measuring time as an imaginary component of Minkowski space. Imaginary numbers appear as the square root of minus one, designated i, raised by some factor. Thus 1i, 23i and -127i represent imaginary numbers. As imaginary numbers measure intangible phenomena so well, less confusion would have arisen if mathematicians had called them ’intangible’ instead.
Human perception and real numbers have tended to reduce the enormity of the whole of intangible time to a thin stream that we call real time. Consequently we have to use the rather weird mathematics of imaginary numbers if we wish to add the entirety of time back on to the convenient abstraction of so-called real time.
If we follow the Minkowski formalism of measuring time as imaginary space then ’imaginary’ (sideways) time appears as a sort of PSEUDO-SPACE, a convenient location for quantum superpositions in the present to occur in, and a place to store all the multiverses of the past and future.
Wizards used to call this stuff ’Aether’
Commentary 43
Memory and limited imagination create so-called ’real’ time by picking out a thin stream of dubious causality from the intangible immensity all around us.
Paradoxically, the convenient fiction of one dimensional ’real’ time arises from our imagination, but the greater reality of the three dimensional temporal continuum has to bear the somewhat derisory label of ’imaginary’.
To anyone who has so completely missed the point of all this that he asketh: “Where lieth this imaginary time?” We reply: “Where lieth your real time; where lieth all those things that you might do tomorrow; where lieth all those things that you might have done yesterday; and where lieth both of those histories that contribute to the result of the double slit experiment in quantum optics.”1
Stephen Hawking put his finger on this with the observation that entropy increases with time simply because we measure time in the direction in which entropy increases.
We define our direction of spatial travel as ’forward’, similarly we normally define or direction of entropy increase as straight forward in linear time. We can see sideways in space but not in time, so we assume time has no sideways.
Thus we inhabit a tautological time of our own making.
1 See any good advanced physics text and try to wriggle out of the discombobulating weirdness this entails.