2 Time Dimension in the Quantum Realm?

[stglyde]

According to Nobel Prizer Steve Weinberg, there may a second dimension of time in the quantum realm. Instead of a particle being “spread out” occupying no address in space until the wave function is collapsed, it rather does have an address but not necessarily in our time. Is this possible? Can you refute it?

 

[PatrickPowers]

According to Nobel Prizer Steve Weinberg, there may a second dimension of time in the quantum realm. Instead of a particle being “spread out” occupying no address in space until the wave function is collapsed, it rather does have an address but not necessarily in our time. Is this possible? Can you refute it?

It seems possible to me. The reason I have is that for a photon the proper time goes to zero, but it still is able to change. It rotates and so forth. If it really had zero time then it could not change at all. So it is easy to imagine a second, independent dimension of time.

The trouble this sort of thing is that there is so little to go on. It seems to me that we need experiments as to what is going on on such a level of detail, and until we get those there are so many models to choose from that it is hard to proceed with confidence.

 

[ThomasT]

According to Nobel Prizer Steve Weinberg, there may a second dimension of time in the quantum realm. Instead of a particle being “spread out” occupying no address in space until the wave function is collapsed, it rather does have an address but not necessarily in our time. Is this possible? Can you refute it?

Can you provide a reference for where Weinberg said this? What you wrote, "second dimension of time in the quantum realm", and "not necessarily in our time" (my bold) doesn't make any sense to me.

 

[stglyde]

Can you provide a reference for where Weinberg said this? What you wrote, "second dimension of time in the quantum realm", and "not necessarily in our time" (my bold) doesn't make any sense to me.

Sorry I heard it wrong. I thought I heard Weinberg when it was Steve Weinstein in the Science Channel Morgan Freeman series "Through the Wormhole". He mentioned Steve at at 37:00 minutes at



article at http://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/139

his exact paper about it at http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Weinstein_FQXI2.pdf

Please refute it.

 

[PatrickPowers]

Sorry I heard it wrong. I thought I heard Weinberg when it was Steve Weinstein in the Science Channel Morgan Freeman series "Through the Wormhole". He mentioned Steve at at 37:00 minutes at



article at http://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/139

his exact paper about it at http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Weinstein_FQXI2.pdf

Please refute it.

There's nothing much there to refute. It isn't all that substantial, and isn't meant to be. It is a preliminary exploration of a possibility and he doesn't try to show it has any physical significance. He discusses some quite general properties. My favorite part is

"there is evidence of nonlocality in the large and in the small. In the large, cosmology is dotted with disturbingly ad hoc constraints on the states of the universe, particularly the low entropy and near-homogeneity of the early universe. (These are addressed but not resolved by in‡ation, which requires its own set of …ne-tuned parameters [7].) In the small, quantum mechanics predicts nonlocal entanglement between the properties of a given …field at various locations in space. It would certainly be worthwhile to explore whether nonlocal constraints might explain any of these phenomena, perhaps in conjunction with a modi…fication of the dynamical laws. The sort of constraint explored in this essay, one arising from the presence of extra time dimensions, exhibits one sort of nonlocality, but there are other sorts as well, given by constraints with di¤erent functional forms. What they have in common is that they embody what I have called “nonlocality without nonlocality”, meaning nonlocal correlations without nonlocal causation."