I am not professional physicist; but I am curious about Stephen Hawking's "imaginary time". It would be better to elaborate exactly what it is. I am not confused because of the word "imaginary" but I find it confusing to imagine a two dimensional "plane time". If we express time in a plane instead of a one dimensional axis, then what does the movement of an observer along the imaginary axis signify physically?
Answer
Imaginary time has no physical meaning. It is an assumption physicists make, namely, that the math will endure the analytic continuation of the time variable onto the complex plane, which makes some calculations easier, but it is not absolutely necessary (e.g. you can do instantons without imaginary time).
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