Quora answer: Why does string theory have only one time dimension? What would it mean if it had two or more?
I have developed something called General Schemas Theory. It is the next emergent level up from Systems Theory. It asks what else is there other than systems, that are different yet belong together with the as being the same type of ontological concept. They only way for the word System to keep its meeting is for it to be distinguished from other ontological concepts of the same sort. It is odd that no one that I have found has delved into this level of abstraction previously. To kick things off I offer the hypothesis S-prime says that there are ten schemas with the rule that there are two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. Schemas stretch from the negative first dimensions through the zeroth dimension up to the ninth dimension. See http://about.me/emergentdesign which is my dissertation on Design that uses the Schemas to explore the nature of design.
The Schemas with their associated dimensions look like this:
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F2-Theory – 14 — Three orthogonal Timelines
F1-Theory -12 — Two ortogonal Timelines
M-Theory 11
String Theory 10
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Pluriverse 8-9
Kosmos 7-8
World 6-7
Domain 5-6
OpenScape (meta-system) 4-5
System 3-4
Form 2-3
Pattern 1-2
Monad 0-1
Facet -1-0
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The point of this juxta-position of Schemas theory hierarchy and the development of String Theory is that string theory appears right at the point where string theory starts, and thus it is unschematized, in other words we have no natural way of thinking about strings, branes and the other assorted features that string theory brings to prominence. But more than this we have learned that the five different string theory possibilities in the tenth dimension become symmetries of a higher theory in the eleventh dimension. And one might hope that things would simplify even further in the twelfth dimension. But mathematics throws a wrench in the works in the next higher dimension by introducing two orthogonal time lines which physicists do not know what to do with because it appears that there is only one time dimension from the point of view now within our metaphysical tradition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_time_dimensions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-theory
Itzhak Bars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itzhak_Bars
Steven Weinstein: http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~sw/papers.htmlHowever, this possibility was thought of in the 1920s by Dunne, but quickly swept under the carpet, having effects only on literature, like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other authors in that time period who heard of this extraordinary theory that time might be multi-dimensional like space. Dunne wrote the Serial Universe to reconcile his theory with that of Einstein but this along with his other works were quickly forgotten and relegated to the dustbin of history.
But now we face the limit of F-Theory where two dimensional orthogonal time is brought to our attention again as we search for a higher and higher unification of nature. For a long time philosophers have been looking for the key to the end of the Metaphysical Era, and one thing that would definitely break that spell would be if there was two dimensional orthogonal time, and not only that, but it has always been there and we were merely oblivious to it. I call this new world era the Heterochronic. It shatters the illusion of the metaphysical era in which we have been trapped since Thales just as certainly as the metaphysical era shattered the preceding Mythopoietic Era. We have been nostalgic for that Era ever since we lost it, though the symmetry breaking of time.
The new symmetry breaking would take us into a world with two dimensions of space and two dimensions of time, within the wider multi-dimensional realm in which we live. We see this in the ideas popping up in physics that allude to the possibility that what we think is three dimensional reality is just a projection from a two dimensional surface in higher dimensional spacetime. If we think of our world actually being two dimensional in space and two dimensional in time and that the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time is an illusion, then this would have profound effects on our actual understanding of the world.
We posit that each symmetry breaking of the worldview gives us a new way to understand the matrix of timespace/spacetime. In the metaphysical era the breakdown in -3time+1space and 3space-1time. If this shifts to 2space-2time then the chiasmic difference of spacetime and timespace will be lost.
In effect this says that the projection of three space comes from the rotation in a second timeline of the plane of space. Same thing is true of time, it is composed of a separate rotation in a different space of the plane of time.
We have known since Kant that space and time were a priori synthetic singular projections that we intuit.
Kant separated the projection of space and time (as absolutes) from the categories, and then schematized the categories to bridge between space and time. There are four categories Quality, Quantity, Modality, and Relation with their sub-categories that form a dialectical construct.
We now know that space-time is fused into a single continuum as is energy-matter, and also info-entropy.
It is tantalizing to image that the further symmetry breaking in which we lose the 3-1/1-3 signature takes us into the realm of that projection itself.
We now know that most of what we see as full bodied reality is in fact an illusion produced by our brains. We see very little of the world around us and fill in most of the scene ourselves. The fact that we see a full bodied world that is so rich shows that our brains are working overtime behind the scenes to give us the impression that the world of our experience is rich and comes to us fully in our experience of it.
But there are all kinds of oddities to explain, one of which is how time seems to speed up as we get older and can dilate given various experiences that we are undergoing. In a sense we know that our time is different from objective time. We speak of subjective and objective time. Bernstein criticizes Kant in his lecture course for only giving us Objective time of physics when it is clear that there are various different kinds of time to be accounted for.
If there were two dimensions of time we could more easily explain our experience of different appearances of time in our experience. And also if space is really two dimensional and three dimensions is an illusion to us then that more easily explains the difference between objective space and the projected space we produce a priori.
What we are saying is that in the mythopoietic space was experienced four dimensionally as was time. There were four moments of time and four dimensions of space. When the Metaphysical era occured there was a break in time into the familiar 3s-1t and 1s-3t signatures we all know and love.
But if another symmetry breaking occurs the chiasma between spacetime and time space will vanish and we will be in a very odd world where the signature will be 2t-2s, and spacetime and timespace will collapse together.
But that will surely take us into the heterochronic world era as metaphysical time is always one dimensional either in a straight line or in a circle.
In the mythopoietic era there were four moments of time. The fourth moment was mythic time. We lost that moment and the Gods fled. We keep trying to get it back in various ways. But according to Heidegger the Metaphysical will be over when the last god has fled. Of course the last God is the first God. For instance, though Hurian/Hittite myth we have discovered that there was Alalu prior to Uranus, and so the generations of gods stretch back further than we realized. The deeper we go searching for the first god the closer the last god gets to us.
In the Heterochronic we get the mythic time moment back to balance the present, and we lose the past and future as time because they collapse back into the Preterite, the original time of the Orlog in the Indo-European worldview. Of course, the preterite is preternatural. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preternatural).
A friend reminded me of this diagram:
He says it is from the FQXi: scientific director Max Tegmark http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.htmlBut I am not sure which publication it is mentioned in.
2011.12.26 I read this article again and found it very interesting. The whole question was whether these various dimensional combinations were stable enough to give anthropocentric observers. The fact that 4s-4t and 2s-2t are both unstable is actually good for my point because what we are saying is that 4s-4t of the mythopoietic did undergo a symmetry break of the kind described in the Bicameral Mind. So the four dimensions of time and space were unstable. And since it is an image of the meta-system when the symmetry breaking occurs then we get into a stablity which is the meta-physical era. This also fits my view that the Multiverse is Hyperbolic and so that is why we see everything as expanding. And when universes are created in the multiverse then they are elliptical. When the meta-physical breaks into the heterochronic it will again be unstable, because the projection mechanism will be visible to us, which is normally invisible. The four dimensional matrix of spacetime, and the 2s-2t X 2 are both basically the same formation. So fundamentally we went into a stable configuration during the metaphysical era and we are basically returning to an unstable heterochronic era which is more or less like the mythopoietic without gods, i.e. it is a symmetrical configuration and that sets us up for a symmetry breaking into a more stable but higher energy pattern of spacetime configuration on the 3s-1t pattern which has a version for time (i.e. the tachion configuration) and the normal pattern of 3s-1t.
Notice that the 2s-2t universe of the heterochronc that I am flouting speculatively in this answer is hyperbolic and unstable in this diagram as is the 4s-4t of the mythopoietic. The chiasm between the 3s-1t and the 1s-3t has our stable universe in it, but the opposite of that is one with tachions which is extremely interesting.
Now this diagram is talking about physical time, and I am talking about the ontological expression of phenomenological timespace in eras which are the largest emergent periods in our worldview when we talk of the various eras. But the analogies are quite interesting.
For graphics see:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lFoHMLcddn6tMDsZWkNM-At9ibidVbTD-FeSLExHysM/edit