system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: can someone explain Dr. Hawking's concept of "Imaginary Time" like I'm 5? What does it exactly mean in laymen's terms?
gpt
Okay,  think about it this way. 

Imagine that you want to specify exactly where and when something happened.

So, first you have to put it somewhere on earth:

You need  longitude (how far East or West from a specific place)
and latitude (how far North or South from a specific place). 

So you have two separate measurements you need to take to put something at a particular place on the earth's surface. (also up-down, if you want to worry about being above sea level).

For time, we usually have only one line we worry about : Past-Future. 

What Hawking is saying is that in order to do certain kinds of physics, it might be useful to have a second line that *behaves like* our normal time-line, the Past-Future line, but is as distinct from it from it as the East-West line is from the North-South line.

So, just like the East-West and North-South lines are sort of similar in how we interact with them, but perpendicular to each other (but very different in behavior from the time-line) - the regular Past-Future line and the "Imaginary Past-Imaginary Future" line would be similar in the way they behave, but treated as "perpendicular" to each other in calculations. 

Why "imaginary"? Because there's a kind of numbers called imaginary numbers, and you work with them by taking the normal number line, and putting another number line perpendicular to that, which is called the imaginary "axis" (another word for line). 

So now you're probably wondering what it would "feel like" to deal with two different kinds of time ... at the same time.  And there's no real answer to that, because we're only made to experience our one kind of time, and this "imaginary time" is mainly talked about to help understand certain physics calculations about the beginning of the universe - it's not something we could experience ourselves.