this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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I'm still trying to understand perpendicular time
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
waves are related to circles: if you have a line and anchor it at one end, when you rotate it the other end of the line, it draws a circle, but if the paper you're drawing it on moves to one side at a constant speed, you'll get a wave. Alternatively, if you plot where the other end of the line is as time passes (for example, every second or every minute), you'll get a wave. you can do this in reverse too.
it's helpful to convert to circles. from a regular wave, at 0 you don't know if the wave will go up or down without further information. 0 on a circle will correspond to one of two spots, either the very top or the very bottom, and if you know which direction the circle is rotating, you can tell what the related wave will do next.
at least that's my understanding