I’m sure this idea is already somewhere in someone’s book, but I was thinking how there are imaginary numbers which describe an axis of numbers perpendicular to the real numbers we are used to. The other thing that is interesting is that, despite the name, imaginary numbers actually express properties in the physical universe. The equations are, I think, related to Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, things which I never really learned in my Intro to Physics class as an undergrad. I’ve really only seen imaginary numbers and real numbers used on a 2 dimensional surface. But what happens if there are two or three dimensions of real numbers and two or three dimensions of imaginary numbers? Does this have any actual physical meaning?

So I thought about another variation of FTL (faster-than-light) travel. What if the imaginary dimensions are the rolled-up dimensions of M-theory? What if you could somehow move in imaginary space, letting you skip through real space in a non-intuitive manner?

In my fictional universe, imaginary space is essentially one dimensional. A spaceship would have to generate an inflaton field (akin to the first moments of the Big Bang) to traverse the pathway. In retrospect, this is simply just like traveling through a worm hole, where you would have to expand the wormhole with exotic material that exerts negative pressure/anti-gravity to prevent it from collapsing on you. I guess the only difference is that you could (in theory) initiate travel from anywhere instead of have to find (or generate) a wormhole.

The weird things I think of before I drift off to sleep.