In one of his lectures, L Susskind stated that he cannot make sense of a metric with more than one timelike dimension. I also have trouble imagining it, but is there a good mathematical or physical reason why this is not possible?
Let us assume all extra timelike dimensions are compactified, so we cannot directly observe them. What kind of trouble or unphysical problems would this create? I am not asking for non-standard physics here, but just a more formal reason than intuition as to why we assume the extra dimensions are necessarily spatial (I have a basic understanding of why string theory needs extra spatial dimensions, but I do not understand if it forbides extra time dimensions). The question is not limited to string theory though.
