  We introduce the notion of conformal walk dimension, which serves as a bridge
between elliptic and parabolic Harnack inequalities. The importance of this
notion is due to the fact that, for a given strongly local, regular symmetric
Dirichlet space in which every metric ball has compact closure (MMD space), the
finiteness of the conformal walk dimension characterizes the conjunction of the
metric doubling property and the elliptic Harnack inequality. Roughly speaking,
the conformal walk dimension of an MMD space is defined as the infimum over all
possible values of the walk dimension with which the parabolic Harnack
inequality can be made to hold by a time change of the associated diffusion and
by a quasisymmetric change of the metric. We show that the conformal walk
dimension of any MMD space satisfying the metric doubling property and the
elliptic Harnack inequality is two, and provide a necessary condition for a
pair of such changes to attain the infimum defining the conformal walk
dimension when it is attained by the original pair. We also prove a necessary
condition for the existence of such a pair attaining the infimum in the setting
of a self-similar Dirichlet form on a self-similar set, and apply it to show
that the infimum fails to be attained for the Vicsek set and the
$N$-dimensional Sierpi\'{n}ski gasket with $N\geq 3$, in contrast to the
attainment for the two-dimensional Sierpi\'{n}ski gasket due to Kigami [Math.
Ann. 340 (2008), no. 4, 781--804].
