This just naturally suggested the old tune from the group Chicago:

As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my watch, yeah
And I said

Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I cant imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry

Are we missing a dimension of time?

A scientist has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with, and even proposed a way to test his heretical idea next year.

Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensions, with four of space and two of time.

“There isn’t just one dimension of time,” Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles tells New Scientist. “There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us.”

DOH! How could we have missed this?

Until now, they have been reluctant to meddle with time because it can lead to unexpected consequences, such as time travel.

That’s why!  Avoiding that pesky ole’ time travel paradox:

Changing our picture of time from a line to a plane (one to two dimensions) means that the path between the past and future could loop back on itself, allowing you to travel back and forwards in time and allowing the famous grandfather paradox, where you could go back and kill your grandfather before your mother was born, thereby preventing your own birth.

Bars first found hints of an extra time dimension in M-theory in 1995 and, when he looked into it, discovered the grandfather paradox and other fears could be overcome by using a new kind of symmetry – a mathematical property to work out the relationship between the quantities of position and momentum. It is this symmetry that might help reconcile the two mighty pillars of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity.

And then there’s this aspect of it…anyone else remember your Platonic “ideals” (reality) and their shadows (what we experience)?

According to Bars, the familiar four dimensional world we see around us is merely a “shadow” of the six-dimensional reality, just as a hand makes many different shadows on a wall when lit from different angles.

Although we cannot experience the extra time dimension directly, we can effectively notice it through the different perspectives of the different “shadows”.

Actually – this is really cool stuff…it would be really neat to figure all this stuff out.

My background from teaching years of H.S. physics isn’t up to all the math details of this, but conceptually I really get into this sort of stuff…I guess it appeals to my SciFi instincts.

If you REALLY want to see what Bars says about this himself, go here, but be warned…this is real physics stuff, even though he’s discussing it conceptually, more or less.