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I have been turning this over in my mind since I first heard of it. Here is how I think this works.
Imaginary numbers are very familiar to the physicist, who uses them constantly in everything. They probably aren't as familiar to non-physicists, who maybe learned them in high school, but then only as some abstract mathematical formality that was kind of neat but didn't really mean anything. So as a graduate student of physics, let me assure you that imaginary numbers aren't just abstract, but have a solid physical meaning, and are crucially important in describing the physical behavior of a number of systems, most importantly quantum mechanics.
If complex numbers seem "unreal", it is chiefly because the 3 dimensional space of the universe excludes them.
A point in this plane is a complex number.
Each direction and time is its own plane.
I propose that the universe is a 4-dimensional complex manifold. If you don't se habla math jargon, that means I propose the 3 space dimensions and the 1 time dimensions are actually in themselves complex, meaning they take values of the form a+ib, part "real" and part "imaginary". Within this 4D manifold, there are sixteen hexadectants (like quadrants, but 16 of them), corresponding to whether we consider only the real or imaginary part of each of the four dimensions. In our particular hexadectant, the three space dimensions are real, and the time dimension is imaginary.
If the above sounds weird to you, please remember that the original proposal of special relativity by Einstein and Minkowski (and others) explicitly treated time as a strictly imaginary coordinate in pseudo-Euclidean space. It is only modern formulations that have turned to Minkowski space with signed metric tensors. Also, imaginary time dimensions show up again in quantum field theory to relate quantum path integrals to statistical mechanical path integrals, this done by means of a Wick rotation.
So the concept isn't foreign to physics, was used early on to help get special relativity started, and has shown up since to help quantum field theory to calculate things.
Within this complex spacetime, all mass is shared, and also wave functions of particles are shared, so that effects can leak between them. This may account for dark matter and dark energy. Because the imaginary coordinates in a plane wave will turn it in to a decaying function (e^ik(ix) = e^(-kx), which goes to zero as x increases), mostly particles hang out in their own hexadectant and don't leak out.
I further propose that the stEin and the stAin universes are actually just different hexadectants of the same universe: in the stEin universe, all three spatial dimensions are real and time is imaginary; in the stAin universe, all three spatial dimensions are imaginary and time is real. Of course, from the standpoint of stEin/stAin this won't produce any mathematically significant difference; it's the same as choosing (+++-) or (---+) convention for Minkowski space, which at the end doesn't alter predictions or measurements. We'd never know if we did swap.
Given the weak interaction of particles between these hexadectants, stEin and stAin both evolved in time along similar lines, staying very close to one another. Jan and Stan decided to write kids books about bears in both, for instance. But there have also been differences; like some 16th century scribe accidentally spilled some ink on a census page, changing "Berenstein" to "Berenstain" on accident, and they just left it that way.
Somehow, we have all undergone a π/2 phase change in all 4 dimensions so that we moved to the stAin hexadectant, while our counterparts moved to our hexadectant (stEin). They are standing around expressing their confusion about the "Berenstein Bears" and how they all remember "Berenstain Bears" on the covers growing up.
I would like to point out, this has nothing to do with the popular and similar theories of the quantum many-worlds hypothesis, nor the cosmological multiverse. It's a different thing, meant to explain our transfer to the world and the similarities.
That's what I think happened, and I'm sticking to it.
P.S. This post has gotten a lot of attention in recent months. I've seen a lot of what he internet has to say about the incident, and have written a post trying to combine a lot of the wisdom from other forums, including photographic evidences, in to a summary post. I suggest that those curious check it out, and especially the links included there. |
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