Feb 18, 2017
What is imaginary time?
While imaginary time sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, I wouldn’t say it’s anything so grand. Really, it’s just a handy mathematical tool physicists can use when analyzing quantum and relativistic systems. Mathematically, imaginary time runs perpendicular to real time, creating a 2-D ‘complex plane’ of time. Using imaginary time can be helpful to explain certain events in statistical mechanics and cosmology, but its actual ‘existence’ can be debated.
As Stephen Hawking once said “From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in.”
