From Simon Bennett
Marcus Chown proposes a second time dimension (13 October, p 36), but he gives no real indication of how this might work or its implications, beyond resolving some problems in string theory and grand unified theories.
It is not clear to me why an object moving through a second time dimension – call it t – should be able to travel backwards in normal time, t, just because it is no longer travelling along the t axis, like some object plucked from the x–y plane in Flatland and deposited elsewhere in the plane, having been moved through z. It seems to assume that what we perceive as time is parallel to the t axis with some constant value of t, possibly zero, rather than being a vector with components in t and t, and that moving away from this axis somehow overcomes the monotonic nature of time as we experience it.
Could t explain the relativistic time dilation effect? May objects accelerating towards the speed of light still travel forwards in hypertime at a constant rate, the t component increasing and the t component decreasing, while these stay the same for the stationary observer?
In an article in an earlier issue, Saswato Das wrote that cryptographers expect to stay ahead of the quantum code-breakers by using techniques such as hash chains that “require you to wait to calculate one thing before you calculate another” (15 September, p 30). What if quantum computers can operate in multiple time dimensions, so that one calculation can take place at the same time as another in t but before it in t?
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