One of my colleagues here at USC, Itzhak Bars (picture right, by Don Milici), spends a lot of effort trying to understand aspects of time. In fact, in his way of approaching things, the fact that we see a single time dimension (all the others being space dimensions) would be a consequence of certain choices (“gauge choices”, in the more technical language) made, whereas in the underlying formulation, there’s be two times. Yes, two.
You hear about extra dimensions, and you think “string theory”, no doubt. No, this is nothing to do with string theory. He’s developed this idea independently of string theory for years, working first with quantum mechanics, and then with field theory (more recently). I don’t work on this, and so do not understand all that he does, but having heard a couple of seminars on it, it’s actually quite interesting (at least structurally and algebraically… I do not think he works out a new approach to dynamics yet), but you’ll need to allow yourself the time (and open mindedness) to follow the general picture of what he’s doing, since he quickly starts tinkering with things that we’ve all been brought up to consider somewhat sacred. In his recent field theory work incorporating this, he’s even begun to recast the Standard Model Lagrangian in these terms and says that he has extracted phenomenological consequences. So it might be worth a look. If you want to look and find out more, look at his website for links.
The science writer Tom Siegfried wrote an article for one of our internal publications about Itzhak and his work. You can read it here.
-cvj
I’m in one of my busy periods and am lucky I even got around to reading this post. I hope I can manage to follow the links and get a better idea of what Bars has been exploring. Time is a rocky shoreline against which many minds have been dashed; one of the big-name philosophers (Husserl? Kant? someone else?) spent 20 years trying to figure it out without getting anywhere (except in the temporal dimension). Last year, in Palle Yourgrau’s book on Einstein and Gödel, I read about the latter’s argument that time does not exist, a conclusion he reached after considering rotating universes, I believe. Meanwhile, one has to wonder what difference culture makes to our subjective experience of time. It’s all very fascinating.
Thanks for this!
Bee,
I wonder how one would maintain an “illusion” of chronology in a theory with three or more time dimensions, without invoking any “chronology protection” type of conjectures by hand. Or for that matter, how would causality be maintained in theories with more than three time dimensions?
Yes. Same thing.
-cvj
By “spatial direction” do you mean “spatial dimension?” I don’t understand what you meant by this. Thanks.
hi JC, I’ve always liked the idea to have 3+3, it just makes a nice impression. but I am afraid there are more semi-plausible reasons not to. best, B.
(Silly question). Are there any semi-plausible reasons to look at theories with three or more time dimensions?
Hi Clifford,
Thank for pointing this out! This is really interesting, I will have a closer look. Best,
B.
“But it seems to me that there has never been a test verifying that time is a measurable quantity”
I don’t understand. I find it as measurable as lengths in a spatial direction. You probably mean something else….?
As for deeper things about what Itzhak Bars is assuming, please address those questions to him.
Best,
-cvj
Interesting. I asked this question on Backreaction, but maybe you can help too. I believe that Prof. Bars is assuming that time is what clocks measure. He has no doubt that time as a measurable quantity exists. He is just looking for a better theoretical explanation. But it seems to me that there has never been a test verifying that time is a measurable quantity. What is your thoughts on this? Thanks.