[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your excellent posts, betty boop!

A-G -- this is what I imagine all of space-time would look like, if we could "get out of it" and take a perch in our hypothetical 5th time dimension.

Indeed, my view is very similar. Outside of our 4D space/time – in an extra dimension of time – the 4D would appear as a block, a unity, the entire movie appears at once. From inside the 4D, it would seem that the movie advances one frame at a time - were it not for some strange things going on, especially in physics and cosmology.

Because the extra time dimension renders the time dimension of our 4D block as a plane (or brane) and not a line – past, present and future are moot. This could very well explain a number of physics enigmas: dark energy, non-locality, superluminal events, superposition. In areas bordering metaphysics, it also could explain such things as precognition, retrocognition, remote healing, power of prayer and positive thinking, consciousness, near death experiences, etc.

PatrickHenry, you dispute the existence of an extra time dimension:

The problem is -- at least I see it as a problem -- there just ain't no such place. You're either in the universe, which means being in time, or you're nowhere. There are no privileged reference frames. Except in science fiction novels.

However, some quite distinguished scientists are pursuing this very aspect with regard to string theory. The most notable may be Cumrun Vafa:

NASA: Superstrings

Things changed in 1996. Andrew Strominger, then at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and Cumrun Vafa from Harvard University, used string theory to "construct" a certain type of black hole, much the same way one can "construct" a hydrogen atom by jotting down the equations, derived from quantum mechanics, that describe an electron bound to a proton.

Strominger and Vafa confirmed a result derived by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking back in the late 1970's. Bekenstein and Hawking found that the amount of disorder (or "entropy") in a special kind of black hole was very large. This was a surprising result, since no one could understand (and nor did the computations give any insight) how an object as simple as a black hole (which can be characterized simply by its mass and its spin) could have such a large amount of disorder within it.

As a result of building this special black hole using string theory, Strominger and Vafa were able to obtain the correct value for the disorder predicted by Bekenstein and Hawking. This result electrified the physics community! For the first time, a result derived with "classical physics" could be obtained from string theory. Even though the black holes for which the result was derived have very little in common with the black holes which are believed to sit in the middle of galaxies, this new computation illustrated the connection between strings and gravity. In addition, the computation provides insight into the physical reasons for the answer.

Here is some of Vafa’s work on string theory relative to dualities, which leads to the extra time dimension:

Geometric Physics

Dualities as Geometric Transitions

Geometric Engineering of N=1 Quantum Field Theories

Evidence for f Theories (1996)

Or for an easier to digest summary, here’s a link and abstract:

Duality and strings, space and time

Duality symmetries in M--theory and string theory are reviewed, with particular emphasis on the way in which string winding modes and brane wrapping modes can lead to new spatial dimensions. Brane world-volumes wrapping around Lorentzian tori can give rise to extra time dimensions and in this way dualities can change the number of time dimensions as well as the number of space dimensions. This suggests that brane wrapping modes and spacetime momenta should be on an equal footing and M--theory should not be formulated in a spacetime of definite dimension or signature.

[PatrickHenry]

Thank you for one of your always thought-provoking posts. I readily admit that I'm not up to speed on string theory. However, until I'm hit in the face with a solid pie of data and argument that I find convincing, I'll stick with my position that there is no privileged vantage point from which one can be, as it were, exempt from time and yet observe all of the things which occur in time.

I have no problem with the notion that the instant of the big bang was the start of time (whatever that means), at least as a practical matter. That doesn't mean -- to me -- that such a place exists now from which some privileged observer can watch over all the centuries. It may be good theology to posit such a state of affairs, but at this stage of my knowledge (scanty) I just don't see it as a scientific possibility. But I'm open to persuasion.