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Comment by t_mann | Hacker News Reader

Dear quantum physicists, when will you stop messing with our minds? Just when we'd warmed up to superpositions over 2^n qubit states, you had to introduce extra time dimensions?

Tbf, the quasi-periodic pulsing explanation is a lot more understandable than the headline had me think. Sounds like the second dimension is just a mathematical interpretation, just like you can reason about which higher-dimensional objects would give rise to a particular 2D pattern if projected onto a plane - it doesn't necessarily mean that the extra dimensions are really there, it just provides us with a new way of thinking about it mathematically (although I wouldn't be surprised if some quantum physicists came round the corner arguing that the second time dimension is actually there, sigh).

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I wonder if one of the reasons more advanced physics can be intractable to understand is because of all of the clever interpretations. By abstracting raw empirical results into an analogous interpretation that defies ordinary logic, we are introducing gates to understanding by some cleverness test.

I see this for instance in the difference between elementary quantum explanations and something more like the Standard Model. One is concerned with indoctrinating some kind of belief or interpretation of phenomenon, even introducing philosophical and unfallsifiable elements, and the other is a useful index of known bits and pieces and their interactions found through empirical digging.

I blame the string theorists. A single time dimension ought to be enough for everyone.

I fully expect us to find multiple time dimensions to actually exist.

But that is just a selfish hope for free will to exist.

think about it:

taps head

If it's a time 'line' then you don't get to pick your direction - no choice is no free will, only if a line exists in a plane does choice come into the picture. /s

Haha, yeah this is missing a taps head meme. But we don't even need multiple time dimensions for free will to exist! I've heard more than one physicist argue that quantum uncertainty alone is enough to get us free will.

I'd argue that a certain randomness of choice could indeed increase freedom of action, though it doesn't grant "free will" in the common sense. There's no need for quantum physics in this, though. A deterministic rand() will do just fine.

I’d be curious how?

My personal bogo science "ship" (that is, it is wrong, I will never get the enthusiasm to learn enough to disprove it, but I like to think about it as I fall asleep).

Why is time "constrained" as a dimension, that is, you can only move one direction through time, why?

So thinking about how to constrain a dimension, I thought of black holes, once you pass the event horizon they remove half a dimension,

This then makes me think of the big bang and why is it not a black hole? the entire mass of the universe in one place... suspicious, then I think... what if it is a black hole(ish) and we(and the entire known universe) are in the event . horizon and the dimension constrained we perceive as time. and each layer of event horizon constrains another dimension.

At which point I usually fall asleep.

Well as long as we're writing scifi...

The way I think about time (also probably wrong and not nuanced enough) is through the energy of a system (entropy?). Essentially if the whole universe operates on a tick based update system, then moving from one state to the next is all about how various particles interact with each other. And this in general would be particles moving from a higher entropy state to a lower entropy state. So effectively to go back in time you'd need a lot of energy to undo all the chemical reactions / potential to kinetic energy conversions etc. that caused us to go from one state to the next. So even if it was possible to undo the appropriate state changes using some magic machine, there wouldn't be energy to do it

Now what's really mind blowing is that if such a machine was operating on you, you might still be conscious in a potentially horrifying way. The conclusions of your thoughts come before the thoughs that triggered them, and then they melt away into the thoughts that will trigger them...

Actually a background detail of a novel I'm writing is that an alien species can perceive and distinguish both time dimensions.

Yeah, it reminds me that as a student I always felt that it's "cute" that a hyperbola can be considered as a 2d section of a double cone, but that this property doesn't really help me in any way when working with them.

Yeah, no, I'm happy in Newton's world thank you very much.

> the quasi-periodic pulsing explanation is a lot more understandable

Whenever I see something may be periodic, it makes me think it just lives in the Complex plane - maybe time is imaginary :headexplode:

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