Saturday, July 05, 2025

Time dimensions

My sisters took exception to my statement that the story about the claim that physics simplified if time was really three dimensions playing roles at different scales was all over the news. I guess we read different news.

Anyhow, I felt well enough to tackle the paper today, and well, ...

He sort-of motivates this framework, and gives a pretty generic description of it in Section 2. I was hankering to see where the different scales kicked in. I'm still waiting.

In Section 3.1 he pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Likewise in 3.2. And... He never shows how he derives anything.

But: "The theoretical predictions and numerical calculations presented in this paper are fully described within the text"

Maybe the rest of the text is somewhere else? He cites some of his own work Charge as a Topological Property in Three-Dimensional Time which goes into a bit more detail, but I still don't follow how the different time scales emerge, nor how you can have the specified symmetry if they do have different scales. Nor how he gets 1/3 of a charge for quarks but whole numbers for leptons.

Maybe he explains how they have different "symmetry orders" in another paper he cites. I will not hold my breath.

Two time dimensions apparently are plausible possibilities in string theory, except that they don't work very well there. I did a little of my own noodling on possibilities, which I'll try to post--no string theory required.

2 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I have bad news, James. Your sisters were right. It's not all over the news.

I did not follow much of what you said, but can guarantee you that a lot of people are going to think getting to say "time is three-dimensional" is cool.

Grim said...

This is kind of a neat theory. I wouldn't have thought to use the three very different ways that time works at different scales to create an orthogonal three dimensions of time. If their predictions prove out, which bears further testing, they may be on to something.