Time As A Coordinate

[maddog]

In a recent quarterly edition of Scientific American is a special issue on time. On page 22 is an article called "A hole at the heart of physics" by George Musser.

 

In this article he lays out the case the growing conundrum of getting a cohesive theory of quantum gravity, that one needs to wrestle the discrepancies between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity branches of physics. This breaks down to each has a different notion of the meaning of time.

 

In QM time is a needed parameter because of the philosophy of substantivalism, whereas in GR it is extraneous because of relativism.

 

For example two physicists Wheeler and DeWitt attempted taking Einstein's General Relativity theory into a quantum theory by a method canonical quantization.

When applied to EM theory of Maxwell it worked fine, yet when applied to relativity it produces the Wheeler-Dewitt equation that is time independent (no time parameter).

 

For myself, I am considering alternative ideas similar to one I heard from a string theorist from UCLA on Morgan Freeman's show "Through the Wormhole".

He is theorizing of "rolling up" an extra dimension to the scalar time variable (this would make it more vector like - i think). By a transformation that I believe to be isomorphic, I could as well used time to instead be complex parameter using polar coordinates: t = t0 * e^it'. This oscillates in intervals of 2*PI.

 

I am interested to hear other peoples thoughts.

 

maddog

Edited March 7, 2012 by maddog