International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
Volume 13 (1990), Issue 1, Pages 179-185
doi:10.1155/S0161171290000242
On the nature of time
Physics Department, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks 58201, ND, USA
Received 26 August 1988; Revised 14 September 1988
Copyright © 1990 M. Muraskin. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
We study how the notion of time can affect the motion of particles within the No Integrability Aesthetic Field Theory. We show that the Minkowski hypothesis of treating x4 as pure imaginary as well as the fourth component of vectors as pure imaginary, does not lead to different solutions provided we alter the sign of dx4 and certain origin point field components. We next show that it is possible to introduce time in the situation where all fields are real so that: (1) The field equations treat all coordinates the same way; (2) The “flow” concept is associated with time but not with space; (3) Data is prescribed at a single point rather than on a hypersurface as in hyperbolic theories. We study the lattice solution in the approximation that ignores zig-zag paths. This enables us to investigate the effect of a non-trivial superposition principle in the simplest way. We find that such a system, combined with our new approach to time, gives rise to an apparent infinite particle system in which particles can be looked at as not having well defined trajectories. This result is similar to what we obtained when we treated time in the same manner as the space variables in our previous work.