FACTBOX: Physicist Stephen Hawking

As a result of this research, Hawking proposed a model of the universe based on two concepts of time: “real time,” or time as human beings experience it, and “imaginary time,” the time on which the world may really run.

“The universe is self-contained, and without boundary, in imaginary time. However, in real time, the universe will appear to begin at the Big Bang,” Hawking said, referring to the explosion thought to be at the origin of the universe.

What a lovely fucking paradox! Real time for the ticking off of our hours and days … but it may well be that Real Time is Imaginary Time.

I knew it. This explains so much. Seriously. Wait til we find that it’s all made up, every moment invented to suit yourself—or not. The poor fucks who don’t know the Secret and other luckless sods. The poor souls universal, starving in Bangladesh, dying of Swine Flu, who don’t know they could create another reality right this second! And be well! And never die! Ooop, don’t know ’bout that last part. How do these “Secret” types explain that nasty business at the end of life. When the person they have nurtured into total mastery … ashes to ashes, and all that. Tis all for naught—but Success is such a deep and pathological, narcissistic part of the American Dream, I think we are left foundering, as a nation, when it comes to the Big Wind Down. As I say, The Nasty Business at the end.

The farthest these types can go—New Age is it?—might be a lovely tea party kind of death. Tell you what, though, I think the real secret is, there is no secret. Fate is going to whop you upside the head if it hasn’t already; perhaps there’s a measure of character in how you handle it. Certainly there is grace in how few people you make miserable. Character and Grace. If we’re living in Imaginary Time.

{ fin }

Tags: cosmology

§ 4 Responses to “Imaginary Time”

• bmo says:

  11 June 2009 at 12:31 PM

  Death is for losers. Don’t be a loser. Live strong.
  • zo says:

    11 June 2009 at 12:42 PM

    “Death is for losers.” I never really thought of that. May I blog it? This could change the world.
• Philip says:

  11 June 2009 at 2:22 PM

  “Imaginary Time” actually has an interesting mathematical analogue. The best way to actually interpret time is on an imaginary axis perpendicular to the three spatial axes we observe, and its projection onto realspace gives it all the nifty mathematical formalism we see (such as its square being negative in the Minkowski metric).
• zo says:

  11 June 2009 at 2:31 PM

  Oh Philip. Always the joker. You know how I hate Minkowski.