What else are they hiding from us?

Come on, this has been a thing for the last 19+12i years

Regular time is imaginary! That's what's differentiate time from space. Well assuming it was Minkowski spacetime they were talking about.

Shhhhhh if you're too loud, someone will try to monetize it

You can have as many dimensions as you want, just keep taking the integral
- You can make as many dimensions as you want as long as you clean them up when youre done
  
  You can only build one megastructure at a time

Imaginary time are used by a lot of companies in form of your unpaid overtimes
- yhea, but then you get paid in imaginary money

TBF imaginary time is a math trick and not something that actually progresses. It lets us apply results from statistical physics to quantum field theory through a Wick rotation.
- It lets us apply results from statistical physics to quantum field theory through a Wick rotation.
  That sounds like Geordi's plan to save the Enterprise.
  
  we need a pause, then have them explain it in an easy metaphor.
  
  You've got to route it through the deflector dish.
  
  I now want to see a TNG/John Wick crossover.
  
  Or AI slop trained on Geordi
- So true king.
- And you’re trying to tell me that’s not a magic spell you just said? Pfff
- Yeah, duh!

Oh, you can interpretate anti-matter as either matter that has negative energy and travels forward in time, or matter with positive energy that travels backwards in time, and both interpretation are valid under Dirac's equation.
- Oh, that's the guy with the private lake, right?
- I think you mean charge not energy.
  
  Nope. Anti-matter comes as a negative energy density solution to Dirac's equation

I'm still trying to understand perpendicular time
- The easiest way I can explain it is like this: All the sci-fi geeks in the world are familiar with parallel timelines, right? The idea that there's another RymrgandsDaughter out there living in a world where apes with goatees are the "people" but otherwise pretty much everything else is very similar to how things are for us here and now. But like in perpendicular time, nearly everything is completely different than this current timeline, and yet somehow there's a point within where I, Gooberear, took the time out of my morning to completely make up this explanation from thin air and which has no basis in actual fact or reality. The end.
  
  Something something nineteen ninety eight
  
  Damn I wanna meet this ape goatee woman now
- A particle is also a wave, a wave moves back and forth between -X and X passing 0 every time.
  Now, when you measure this particle and it happens to be at zero, sometimes it moves towards X afterwards and sometimes it moves towards -X.
  For the scientists however, all they can measure is that it's at 0 and half the time it randomly goes one way or the other with 50/50 probability.
  To explain this, scientists imagine the particle has more than 0, but it has a secret momentum hidden into it telling it to deflect positively or negatively.
  Imagine a circle instead of a line. Now instead of crossing zero, you rotate around 0 and hit a Y and -Y axis with X and -X unchanged.
  That y axis that contains the hidden momentum of the particle is called "imaginary" because scientists love loaded terms that are unhelpful to understanding lol.
  
  Why are they rotating it? I almost understood until you got there
- The obvious interpretation is that it is 0 real time. Safely ignore, I'd say.

Plot twist: all time is imaginary time.
- Lunchtime doubly so.
  
  Ever had a pan-galactic gargleblaster?
  
  But what about second lunch?
- stares at clock
  "I know your secrets you little dippo"

I keep running out of regular time already, now you tell me I need to keep track of perpendicular time?
- Yeah but it's easy, just take the sine of regular time and you're set.
  
  I thought you had to find the square root of negative time to get it?

A huge portion of Americans aren't sure the earth is round and 'idiocracy' is fictional.
I'm okay with the more esoteric things being reserved for those who can comprehend them.
- Can people please realize that saying Idiocracy is a documentary is agreeing with eugenicists
  
  People living in a society that de-prioritizes and under-funds public education:
  Is this the result of Undesirables breeding?
  
  Fallen into several arguments in Lemmy about exactly that. People give it way too much credence to what is functionally a eugenicist's nightmare. I have no hard feelings at Mike Judge or even the movie really, but it's fiction, not a warning from the future. Honestly, people need to stop treating fiction as documentary evidence in general. At best it's interesting thought experiments, not something one should base their world view on.

I tried to get multiple physicists to help me mine this imaginary time, but they all said that it was "impossible" and that it's "not how time works" or something.
I guess people just really don't want to jump on this money-making bandwagon.
- Just keeping asking until someone (a go getter) gives you the answer you want.

you can have imaginary anything. just imagine it! i especially like imaginary unicorns
- For clarity, are you imagining imaginary unicorns or just regular non-imaginary unicorns?
  
  it's actually the square root of a negative unicorn, duh!

All potential realities of time are happening at once, you are just perceiving one slice of it.

I couldn't conceive of such a thing!
-i•t

My quick guess would be that this a theory that explain some weird phenomenon we don't have a good explanation for yet. Like how we observe that stars and galaxies don't orbit as they should and then say that there is "dark mass" which is responsible.
- It's a math trick. Not a physical theory.
  
  Yup. Electrical engineering does something similar. The addition and subtraction of voltages, currents, resistance, capacitance, and inductance in AC circuits is basically unworkable without the shortcut of converting the sinusoidal waves into imaginary phase angles and doing math on them, and then converting them back to sinusoidal waves as necessary.

It also works that the exact position of an object could also be complex so an imaginary and real location.

If it makes you feel any better - ALL "time" is imaginary. Time is a human construct that has no meaning outside of human endeavor.
- I guess the tauon decays of its own volition then.
  
  All particles 'decay'. Everything particulate decays. what's your question?
  
  I know I do
- Time is as imaginary as up/down, left/right, forward/backward.
  That is to say that the concept and it's consequences exist no matter what we call it. Time is not a human thing, it's one of the dimensions of the space in which we exist. Calling it "time" and a "second" being as many vibrations of a caesium as it is, that's the human bit.
  
  Time is a human construct designed for measuring and scheduling and has no meaning whatsoever outside of human endeavor.
  The universe and the infinite space the universe resides in exist at "now" : an important tenet of 'relativity'. No past. No future. Now. Past, future, time... these are constructs of sentient organisms. The universal "don't believe everything you think" immediately comes to mind.
  We exist in space. Space is infinite - it has no boundaries or edges, has always existed and will always exist. We also exist in this ("our") universe - which is finite, did have a start date, and will come to an end someday. Not soon. Hopefully.
  Space is also infinite "bigger" and "smaller". But let's save that for another time.
  (but does cesium REALLY vibrate the same in different parts of space? h'mm?)