[gumpzilla]

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This is called imaginary time

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While the concept of imaginary time sounds very fantastic, it's pretty much just a mathematical simplification. At its heart, it relies on the fact that the difference between exponential decay and oscillation is a factor of the imaginary number i. So in quantum mechanics, there are a lot of times where finite lifetime effects are handled by assuming that energies have some imaginary part (which then leads to exponential damping), or in field theoretical approaches to condensed matter physics you can use imaginary time to handle effects that come in from non-zero temperatures, because the equations for thermodynamic behavior and the quantum behavior are all roughly the same except for this imaginary factor. But all of this is just a mathematical trick more than any kind of statement about physical reality, at least to my understanding.