Trip report from "spiritual journey" reading eminent physicists

[RJT]

I promise I will not bore the board here further than this post (well who knows, might have just a few along the way) as I begin my journey in reading some eminent physicists.

But, already in my first day I found something I thought related to one of my other posts about the fun discussions that would be had in a room filled with eminent scientists and eminent theologians.

From a public lecture “The Beginning of Time” presented by Stephen Hawking:

“…Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time…it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way, One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But, there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time…”

From “Concerning the Our Father” Simone Weil in “Waiting for God”:

“…He is our Father who is in heaven…we cannot take a single step towards him. We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward him. …we only have to change the direction we are looking.”

[scalf]

[img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] for those with eyes to see; and ears to hear..

gl

[img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]

[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.

[xniNja]

Translation: Stephen Hawking on Imaginary Time is not related to experiencing God.

[RJT]

Don’t get me wrong. I was not trying so much to make similarities to their thoughts as I was simply juxtaposing them.

I would not be so presumptuous to infer that I could even understand the actual formulas of what Hawking is talking about let alone try to explain them as religion.

[ QUOTE ]
Translation: Stephen Hawking on Imaginary Time is not related to experiencing God.

[/ QUOTE ]

It certainly is poetic, though, which may have been the point, given that he was talking about "fun discussions." [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

EDIT: *points to what RJT said*

[RJT]

Exactly. Thanks, Morph.