The Pleasure of Discovery

We each innately get pleasure in discovering how various parts of the universe work and we then make choices based on those discoveries that are each part of our life’s meaning and purpose. We have innate feelings and emotions and so we get pleasure discovering parts of life’s meaning and purpose that are necessarily beyond conscious rational thought as well. We make choices based on our feelings and emotions and beyond science and rational thought, our purpose in life is a primal belief in discovery and that meaning is a necessary primal belief that we all simply have for the purpose of discovery in each of our lives. We get pleasure discovering how various parts of the universe work, but we cannot test that purpose nor can we further describe that purpose except by the other two primal beliefs; the pleasure of our discovery of origin and destiny.

• There are many who get pleasure discovering more than the meaning of life and how the universe works...they get pleasure discovering the meaning of everything. In order to discover the meaning of everything, though, one must first understand their innate anxiety about the dark lonely nothing of empty space.

The only way to define a primal axiom like the pleasure of discovery is with the other two complementary primal beliefs in the pleasure of origin and destiny. Even though our innate purpose is the pleasure of discovering how the universe works, if we somehow know where we are going in life, we also get pleasure in finding out how to get from where we are, our origin, to where we are going, our destiny, and we get pleasure discovering that journey.

Our pleasure in discovery is an axiom that is in some sense like the axiom of matter; since matter is just the way it is and there is no further definition of matter possible except by the two complementary primal axioms of action and time. Although we can say a matter object is red or is large or shiny, once we reduce an object description to a primal belief like matter itself, matter is just matter, which is an identity or ontology and therefore an axiom.

Of course, our life and consciousness are both prerequisites for an awareness of belief or of any other axiom. Just like objects are the accumulation of moments of matter, memory is an accumulation of moments of thought as the brain matter that is a part of consciousness. The matter moments of long-term memory couple with the neural recursion that comprises the moments of thought of a day. The sensation-feeling-action of present thought along with long-term memory and emotion completes the neural recursion that we call consciousness.

Our memory is a function of consciousness and memory is a record of the action as moments of thought. The neural recursion of action along with the memory that we have are both objective mechanisms of our mind that together form our consciousness. Our time-like consciousness, though, is a combination of these two objective properties of our brain that result in feeling. Therefore consciousness represents a subjective reality in our mind that complements the objective reality of the world outside of our mind. This dualism of mind and body has a long history in philosophy.

The question of our purpose has only one clear answer; our purpose is discovering how the parts of the universe work and so purpose is an identity and a primal belief that is only explicable as the other two complementary primal beliefs of origin and destiny. Ultimately, discovery is all about discovery for its own sake. Once again, we see the replay of the dual representations in the definitions of an axiom.

Purpose as discovery is how we get from where we are to our destiny, from yesterday until tomorrow and why we imagine desirable futures and how we make choices in our journey from an origin to a destiny. Therefore, purpose, origin, and destiny as such are always what other qualia (the properties of object, like color, weight, and so on) are like, whereas primal beliefs are not like anything else except combinations of their complementary axioms.

If you ask a person in what do they believe, their reply is usually in a religion or in a science or in a metaphysics and we imagine their beliefs are a purpose for their lives. Belief and meaning are essential to every conscious life and we all know how to answer the question of in what do we believe, but we do not often recognize that without belief, we simply cannot be.

We have an innate anxiety over the nothing that is the empty void of space and we each must first of all frame our reality to deal with this anxiety over the nothing of empty space and over being alone in that empty space. With our relational reality, instead of a largely empty space with just a few objects of our Cartesian reality, we fill time with the many possibilities of relations with those objects. We frame each of our lives and each of our physical realities with the three primal beliefs of origin, destiny, and purpose for all objects and this trimal is essential for predicting action and indeed trimal beliefs are necessary for survival.

We might have a purpose driven by innate anxiety, say about dying or about the empty voids of a lonely life or about what's for lunch, and yet we might not even consciously know why we are are anxious about dying or why we are anxious about being alone or why we are hungry. Such a hard-wired anxiety can drive purpose whereas anxiety is an emotion which we simply have and believe in and yet many want to associate our innate anxiety with a supernatural agent. Innate anxiety has evolved like so many of our other behaviors and is something that we just accept and deal with in a variety of ways.

We all are innately anxious about the empty voids of our lives and of the nothing of space and of being alone, but in order to understand anything, we must first believe in the nothing of empty space. Since most of the universe that we imagine is the nothing of empty space, that nothing is the most important part the universe that we imagine and that nothing is the most important thing in our lives as well. But nothing is really not as important as it seems.

It is important and often vital to be anxious about nothing since with nothing to eat or drink or without shelter or clothing, we could not survive very long. We look into the nothing of the dark sky at night and wonder about the points of light that we see as part of the universe, but we do not wonder about the empty nothing that separates those distant stars. That dark emptiness is just the same dark empty voids about which we are anxious in our lives.

It seems strange to be anxious about nothing since most of our reality is made up of the nothing of space, and yet we are more certain about the infinitely divisible nothing of empty space than we are about the objects that we sense embedded into that space. We sense many objects around us and so we know their directions quite well, but object distances can be very difficult to sense and know without some guide like parallax or a reflected echo or a standard candle or a tape measure. Space then is a very convenient way to keep track of the many objects of our reality and we get many cues about distance from other objects.

Religion often claims a special role for a supernatural agent everywhere in all the empty voids, especially for innate beliefs like anxiety, since a supernatural agent is fundamentally a belief in a void as something rather than nothing. Religion provides various supernatural agents that make us anxious about nothing, but there are also supernatural beliefs about nothing in science, albeit a more limited set, called axioms.

Where did the big bang come from? What exists inside of a black hole? What is the destiny of the universe? Where do physical laws and their constants come from? The untestable axioms of science provide a very rational framework for prediction of action and a further belief in the science of aethertime allows us to understand our reality.

We call the axioms of science natural because even though there is no way to understand why they are the way they are, we can accept science axioms and use them to predict future action by trusting the intercessories of science. Philosophy calls an ontology the axioms that we accept as true while philosophy calls an epistemology the rules that we derive from such axioms or ontology. In a completely analogous way, innate anxiety naturally affects behavior even if we do not necessarily understand the origin of that anxiety. We can call the innate anxiety over nothing natural or we can associate that innate anxiety with a supernatural agent of some kind for the nothing that we firmly believe does exist.

Although we see or sense objects in space all around us all of the time, we do not often wonder about the process of sensation, how sensation affects feeling, how feeling results in action, and the recursion of how our action results from sensation then in turn feeds back and affects sensation.

While there are clear roles for belief in axioms like matter, time, and action, we also believe firmly in the continuous void of empty space as well. What is space like? It turns out that we can describe objects and predict their futures without knowing the volumes they displace in space, but those volumes, surfaces, lines, and points of space do provide a very convenient frame of reference for action. We further use objects as landmarks in that space to anchor our sense of direction on earth and these landmarks are a prominent feature of conscious thought.

If we know the time delay of objects from each other and how aether exchanges relate objects to each other, we can describe an object as full of its possible futures without knowledge of motion or space or volume. Aethertime completely represents objects as superpositions of many possible futures with just matter, time, and action, and the Cartesian locations of objects emerge in our mind from that relational representation.

Cartesian space is an innate part of our imagination and is a convenient and also a very useful whiteboard for keeping track object action. Cartesian space is therefore deeply embedded into our consciousness and intuition and is a powerful tool of consciousness, but the limitations of continuous space and time can also blind us to a greater understanding of the universe.

We can trust the intercessories of science because science repeatedly tests its propositions against an objective reality, which means that the reality of science is largely of observable Cartesian objects and actions on trajectories in continuous space and time time. Science works best by observing the universe and then making predictions about object actions and then verifying those predictions by careful observations of action. An ongoing discourse of the principles of science provides a means to cull and prune and distill the essence of truth about our material world.

In a Cartesian particle-like reality, objects only interact weakly and exist on separate trajectories in continuous space and time. In a complementary relational reality, wave-like objects strongly interact and exist as matter waves that fill time with a large number of possible futures. A relational reality represents an object as a spectrum of matter waves with matter exchanges that relate it to all other objects as matter waves, which is a matter spectrum. For a reality of weakly interacting objects, though, science can measure and project a red object into a single location in Cartesian space. For the reality of strongly interacting objects, though, science cannot always test its predictions.

For highly relational objects like people, science is often limited to just observation and even though a person can relate their experiences such as that of seeing a red object, science cannot predict a person’s experience in seeing a red object without knowing everything about that person. An experience of a red color will vary from person to person and each person’s life will relate a different set of experiences of red objects to any new experience of a red object. Science can neither measure nor quantify a person’s relational experience of red even though science does very well predicting and measuring the objective Cartesian experience of a red object.

Once science knows enough about a person’s past experiences with red objects, science can then predict fairly well that a person’s experience will be much like those who have similar past experiences with red objects.

The qualities of our feelings about objects, though, are what we call subjective or relational experiences of objects and a feeling is not possible to test or falsify except by query and discourse. A red color, for example, is simply one of the many qualia that we use to help identify and classify objects. How we might feel about a red color is our feeling alone although we can use a machine to measure a red color for an object. Our feeling of the same red of an object is simply not possible to measure, although we can relate our experience of red to others.

Qualia are the hard wiring of our minds and human qualia are therefore a part of the augmentation of Cartesian space with discrete aether and we can describe our feelings about space to others. We associate certain qualia with objects in the same way that we associate the spoken sounds of language with objects and action in time. For example, the names we give objects and their properties allow us to relate those objects to other objects with similar properties and therefore we can predict action much more precisely and describe our predictions to others as well. As others describe their predictions of action to us, we cooperate and that cooperation provides the basis of civilization by enhancing survival in an objective universe.

We project the qualia of space around the objects that we observe. Whether an object is near or far away, whether it is high or low, or in which compass direction it lies, locating objects in space is an absolutely vital means of organizing reality in our mind. In this sense, the infinitely divisible void of empty space that we imagine is just a part of the more general notions of aethertime. In order to imagine objects, we certainly do believe in the null object of empty space and that belief defines how we predict the actions of objects as motion in empty space. But we can also derive any motion in space just from the exchange of an object’s matter in time since all motion is equivalent to a change in inertial mass.

The trimal axioms of discrete aether, time delay, and aether exchange are the primal qualia that relate objects to other objects and matter, time, and action are likewise hardwired into our consciousness. Matter-like qualia are red, black, heavy, light, pain, heat, cold, etc., and time-like qualia are fast, slow, quick, hurry, sluggish, etc., while action-like qualia are weak, strong, hard, soft, feeble, mighty, etc. We relate objects with similar qualia to each other to better predict and describe the likely futures of those objects.

The meaning, imagination, and feeling of each human life is woven into the fabric of civilization and our meaning becomes a part of the collective beliefs in which many of us share. However, just like there are thousands of languages, there are necessarily thousands of beliefs in the meaning of life as well. Despite the existence of many different languages, Chomsky and Wittgenstein have shown that languages are all rooted in the same machinery of our consciousness and that language machinery is part of what makes us human. In a similar way, the machinery of consciousness provides an innate purpose in finding out how the parts of the world work, but on which part of the world we focus varies just like language varies.

Our relational minds have the basic machinery of consciousness that relates objects to other objects as qualia for the purpose of finding out about the world. Just like language is a communication among people about objects, qualia are the relationals of our minds that permit us to find out about the world and describe experience. The machinery of consciousness is present in our minds, but we do need to learn the qualia of consciousness just as we need to learn the words to speak and how to place our feet to walk. Matter, time, and action form a trimal qualia of belief that are hardwired into our consciousness and therefore are a nexus or connection between the objectivity of science and subjectivity of experience.

For example, in our subjective experience of religion and philosophy, we often refer to the objectivity of science. But religion and philosophy deal largely with the relational and not the Cartesian world of consciousness. There is irony in that while aethertime reveals our Cartesian reality actually emerges from the actions of objects, we usually presume that our Cartesian reality is the only reality of both our religious and our scientific worlds.

There are plenty of indications of the limitations of Cartesian space. The infinite divisibility of a void of space, infinitely dividing nothing at all, has posed a conundrum ever since the philosophy of Aristotle and Zeno. More recently, quantum physics shows a universe that differs from that of Cartesian experience and relativity and evolution likewise show us a universe that is different from ordinary experience.

Our Cartesian space, motion, and time are very useful and indeed essential for predictions of action and will always be a very useful and therefore essential parts of consciousness. A Cartesian reality emerges from a multitude of very complex sensations into a few simple imaginings of important objects moving on time trajectories in a void of space. Even though we actually only sense some limited number of an object’s possibilities, with this very limited information, we nevertheless imagine that object and predict its journey through space and in time and sometimes we predict very well. Although we are part of an object’s matter spectrum, we usually presume that the reality that we sense is not affected by our presence.

Just as for all life, predictions of action are the basis of our survival as well and our action predictions evolve given the ever more elaborate stories of science. The stories of science have evolved into such complexity that it takes years of advanced study for even scientists to achieve a current understanding of just a tiny slice of the universe.

In fact, the enterprise of science divides into pieces that seem more like religions than any other religion has ever been. Today people believe very fervently in scientific concepts that they barely understand and sometimes, they simply do not understand them at all, they just believe them as told by a trusted intercessory.

When we do not understand a concept that is nevertheless important to us, we trust an intercessory when they tell us about the actions and objects of that concept. So we now have a new cadre inside of monasteries of science, preaching an everlasting life given the meaning of nothing. Instead of accepting the inexplicable walls of our own universe, some scientists now imagine universes far beyond any testable hypotheses within this universe. Not unlike the mystics of ancient China, India, or Greece, theories of everything abound and propagate and provide a fertile soil for nurturing humanity’s immortal soul.

We ask about the meaning of life because it is only with purpose that we discover how the universe works and we imagine desirable futures and choose actions to journey to those futures. The meaning of life really has no unique answer except as a reflection of the purpose of discovery, and without a purpose, we can have no life since there would be no desirable future, i.e., no desire to discover how to survive. We must discover our desire to survive with purpose and meaning and it is a desirable future that we discover as the purpose and meaning further discovery.

My dog asks for meaning and purpose from me...every day and many times a day. Of course not in human words, but dogs imagine desirable futures and choose actions to realize those futures just like we do.

My dog breathes, drinks, eats, seeks shelter, and constantly searches for scents in the backyard and park, and of course, he revels in the purpose of companionship. My dog loves to walk and smell and leave his scent in the park. He loves to be petted and will sit on any lap for hours and so my dog lives his life imagining and choosing desirable futures and his purpose evolves along with mine.

In fact, that is exactly what humans do as well. Purpose is different for different people and purpose evolves with each person over time, but basically is finding out about how the world works. Purpose is embedded within each life and purpose is why we imagine and choose desirable futures, and that purpose is part of what life is and therefore part of life’s meaning as well.

The recursion of purpose and meaning with a desirable future is actually deeply embedded into each of our life journeys even though it is not always easy to understand why we are on some of the journeys that we are on. When we ask about purpose, we imagine a desirable future with an answer from someone else that will give us purpose. But purpose comes ultimately from within each of us and it is only when we choose actions for a desirable future that we realize our purpose and meaning by those actions.

Our purpose is to understand how various parts of the universe work, imagine the possibilities of desirable futures, select one, and choose actions to journey to that desirable future. Our imagination and our consciousness exist only because of the compassion others and without other's compassion, there is no purpose and no meaning in our own lives either. We see others on very similar journeys in life and we therefore share some purpose and compassion and cooperate with each other on our journeys.

Howard Hughes was a very famous recluse who was selfish in his privacy. And yet Hughes was surrounded by a cadre of compassionate caretakers, bodyguards, and servants and so had compassion and selfishness with others. He also watched television and his security monitors relentlessly and sadly through much of his later life. His reclusive nature still gave him a purpose in discovery of the world around him that depended on the compassion of others that were not typical.

The Unabomber was a recluse who lived alone in a small cabin in Montana on a very modest fixed income. And yet he built explosive devices and mailed them to unsuspecting strangers as part of a selfish diatribe about the selfishness of technology. He found a very selfish purpose injuring strangers in the world with explosive devices since he had no compassion for people in the world with a more civil discourse.

My mother-in-law lived the last several years of her life in the fog of dementia. Unable to completely care for herself, she lived with my wife and me for her last years and we therefore became a part of her purpose. Without us around constantly relating to her, she would get very disoriented and agitated and so we simply could not leave her alone for very long periods of time. She was in some sense alone in her thoughts and increasingly unable to read or watch tv or listen to music.

Although she did read and watch tv and listen to music, she could not relate any of those experiences to anyone with whom she spoke. Her conversations became very rote and about things like the weather. At first, she could still talk about things of her past, experiences that she remembered, but like the driftwood of childhood amnesia, even those memories slowly eroded one by one as the dementia took her spirit from her. She would say that lunch tasted good and would enjoy eating lunch, but she could not remember what she had for lunch after lunch was finished.

Without the purpose and without belief of conscious desire to understand, she increasingly survived on her primitive desires until there was no sense even in those primitive desires and she passed away in a confusion of primitive meaning and purpose. “I am done,” were her final coherent words and a week later, she passed into the same oblivion into which we all shall pass.

We predict futures for isolated Cartesian objects by means of the trimal of matter, time, and action. Although knowing the relational trimal of origin, destiny, and purpose of an object is also helpful, for isolated objects, a Cartesian representation of objects in space is usually sufficient. Our Cartesian reality is a particle-like representation that imagines the isolated behavior of an object interacting with another isolated object.

For highly interacting relational objects like people, though, we need to know more about them and their purposes to predict their futures. That is, we can predict an object’s future by knowing its Cartesian properties of matter, time, and action, but to predict a person’s behavior, it is more important to know about that person’s motivation and purpose than about their Cartesian state. In fact our own relational reality is a wave-like representation that is more about the relations of objects with each other than it is about their Cartesian states.

We tend to ascribe human-like characteristics like purpose and meaning or compassion and selfishness to other objects as a result of the complexity of object action. This anthropomorphic tendency comes from our relational reality where trimal beliefs of origin, destiny, and purpose interpret the action of a complex system as a purpose. Purpose and meaning are simply a way to bond interacting objects within a complex system, and for people, purpose and meaning take on much more importance compared with other simple objects.

The importance of purpose and meaning is with predictions of action and prediction of human behavior also affects human behavior. We teach our children compassion in a complex relational civilization, but we also teach a certain amount of selfishness as well. We then predict their compassion versus selfishness as adults in response to various sensations, feelings, and actions and we are usually pretty good at those predictions.

If people are hungry and thirsty, they will selfishly find food and water. If they are cold and wet, they will selfishly find shelter. If they are on a journey, they will selfishly find transportation. If they are sick, they will selfishly find health care.

However, we are affected by the actions of others and the nature and purpose of our predictions evolve along with the nature and purpose of other’s predictions. These cooperative relations support a relational humanity that has its own purpose and meaning along with its own origin and destiny.

If people are hungry and thirsty, we will compassionately give them food and water. If they are cold and wet, we will compassionately provide them shelter. If they are on a journey, we will compassionately give them transportation. If they are sick, we will compassionately find them health care.

As an accretion of matter from a nebula, the sun in one sense is a selfish accident of time, but our sun has a compassionate purpose in warming us on the earth. While the sun as a Cartesian object follows the selfish physical laws of nature, it is the sun’s compassion relations that binds the earth with gravity and warms earth with radiation from its sun. In the sun’s relations with earth, we say there is purpose and meaning since the consequences of the sun’s warmth are the biomes that support life and support us in our purpose.

We might also consider the water on earth as an accident of time from the accumulation of comet impacts, but those comets are bound to the sun and earth and planets. Water as ice on a comet is a Cartesian object that follows the selfish physical laws while water as a compassionate relational object determines the destiny of earth’s oceans. The purpose of water is to support life just as our purpose is to support life by finding out about the world.

Finally, we might consider ourselves an selfish accident of time and that there is no compassionate reason for our existence, which is part of our innate anxiety about the nothing of space. We surmount that anxiety by finding out how the world works and we do find a purpose and meaning in existence and we do imagine desirable futures and we do act to journey to those futures.

Our purpose is an axiom and is how we deal with our anxiety about the nothing of space and how we get from where we are right now to one of the many possible futures that is our destiny. Both the compassion of relations among objects and the selfish loneliness of empty Cartesian space are our destiny.

Milky Way Spirals Correlate with Life's Extinctions and Explosions

Since we are inside of our galaxy, it is difficult to imagine how our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, looks from the outside. People have put together this diagram of what our galaxy would look like from above the plane of its disk. The sun is at the top of a dashed-yellow 225 million year orbit around the galaxy center. The sun's journey through the galaxy spiral features seems to correlate with various explosions and extinctions of life on earth as shown.

Although the correlation is not perfect, it is very suggestive that changes in our sun's luminosity occur during spiral transits and those changes result in changes in solar irradiance and therefore in earth's climate. Since spiral wave transits also affects the convective cooling of gravitationally compressed matter, spiral transits also impact earth's magma motion and tectonics and volcanism. There are also more gravitational perturbations within a spiral wave and more young stars with more gamma radiation.

Wonders of Spiral Galaxies

The spiral shape of many galaxies is truly one of the more extraordinary mysteries of the universe. Most of the reason for dark matter comes from the constant rotation of all galaxies, however the constant rotation of a galaxy is simply a manifestation of gravitization in quantum gravity.

Gravitization is a vector force that couples moving star decays with each other. The product of a start matter decay, kg/s, and star velocity, m/s, is dimensionally a vector force and each star in a galaxy has a mass decay due to its radiation as well as a velocity vector from its motion. So each star has in addition to gravity an extra gravitization force due to its moving matter decay and those force vectors couple with other stars in the galaxy to make galaxy rotation constant. One manifestation of constant galaxy rotation is the spiral density waves that persist as fundamental modes in many galaxies long after the perturbation of colliding galaxies. Gravitization couples angular momentum of inner to outer stars and that coupling explains why galaxies rotate at constant velocity.

The persistence of spiral density waves of galaxies due to gravitization means that there is no need for the mystery of dark matter to hold galaxies together. The Whirlpool galaxy (below, M51a) has spiral features with reported pitch angles m_A = 16.7°, m_B = 15.8°, while the dashed rectangle has the proportions of the golden ratio, 1.62. The golden ratio rectangle is quite well known in the aesthetics of architecture and art and encloses a golden spiral with a pitch of 17.0°. Why average pitch of galaxies is the golden spiral pitch seems more than just a coincidence.

The asymmetry of the galaxy central bulge, the arrowed circle, is the dynamo that drives galaxy spiral dynamics due to gravitization. With just Einstein's gravity science needs the mystery of dark matter to keep all galaxies from flying apart. The supermassive black hole at the center is therefore somehow tied to the destiny of both the central bulge and the outer spiral disk in a cosmic ballet of gravitization that science barely understands. The tens of thousands of light years across a galaxy are the time equivalents of tens of thousands of years separating events anywhere within the galaxy.

What Is Time?

Defining time seems tricky compared to matter and action, but in many ways, it is overly simplistic views of matter and action that makes time seem rather complex in comparison to matter and action. Time is just a property of a source just like color or size or distance, all of which emerge from matter and action and therefore all sources tell time. While it is clear that clocks tell time, it is perhaps not as clear that all other sources also tell time and time, just like color, is just a property of all sources just like red is a property of an apple. Among the properties of the apple are its color and its ripeness and of course, ripeness tells time for the apple.

Just like the amplitude and phase coherence that are the two dimensions of matter, time likewise has two dimensions of amplitude and phase coherence. There is a long history from ancient Greece that defines two different kinds of time; Kronos as a kind of absolute time and Kairos as a kind of relative feeling of time. These two dimensions of time along with the two dimensions of matter provide realities for quantum charge and gravity that relate time and matter with the Planck action constant, h, in units of kg s. An objective atomic Kronos time is an interval dimension while a subjective decoherence Kairos action is the second time dimension.

While we think of sources as existing without change in one place in space until something happens, sources are always oscillating out of and back into existence including even the universe itself. Sources therefore change and move and evolve, albeit sometimes very slowly at the limit of 0.26 ppb/yr and time emerges from the action of that change. While we imagine inaction as the complement to action, it is only action that exists as less or more action and so an evolving universe is always matter in action. In a quantum universe, there is never really complete inaction and inaction simply means that a source matches our own action or motion. Inaction means that a source evolves just like time and just like matter and so there is never really inaction, just less or more action.

Each of the axioms of matter and action really have the same kinds of trickiness and the definitions of matter and action use words that simply mean the axioms as identities. For example, saying matter is a static dimension then defines matter in terms of time since dynamic is another word for changes in time. That circularity is even more confusing than time was in the first place. Saying action means a sequence of events is likewise circular since sequence is another word that means time.

Figure 1 shows Cartesian interval time as a line of either infinitely divisible moments or finite moments running from past to present to future. Time in this sense is just like a Cartesian displacement in space and this Cartesian view of time is part of general relativity where there is a continuous time with a determinate future. Block time is very similar except time is now made up of finite moments or intervals that run like the frames of a movie camera from past to future. The future for block time can be determinate and just waiting for the present to catch up or there can be many futures.

Relational source action time is an alternate view that tells time by the way that a source is put together as Fig. 2, which is a more primitive relational observer action time. This fossil view of time means that moments of matter come together with past actions and form a source of the present moment from any number of paths. By sensing the source with a matter spectrometer like our consciousness and knowing about the source’s fossil past, an observer can then tell time with any source. There are then a large number of possible futures associated with that present source, but there is no determinate future since all bonding is subject to quantum uncertainty.

Sources with very highly structured and periodic actions tell time as clocks in Fig. 3 as relational source action time. Clocks show very regular action and therefore keep a very precise interval time with moments of matter as long as the moments are very short and periodic. However, source actions are reversible since they are built by quantum bonds and it is therefore necessary to impose an overall decoherence action time in order to point the arrow of interval time. This decoherence or action time can be thermal as in a clock power source running down or a person aging, or indeed the decoherence can be intrinsic and the whole clock shrinks. A universal decoherence points an action time direction as well as a universal quantum force from both gravity and charge.

Axioms really defy further definition by any single term and so axioms are self-evident characteristics of the universe. Time emerges from the two axioms of matter and action and the trimal of matter, time, and action closes our universe. Matter is then a naturally more static dimension while action is a naturally more dynamic dimension and time emerges as the differential of action with matter, dS/dm. 

On the one hand, we think of interval time as a single static dimension of the past, since the past is like the frozen hands of a clock and does not seem to change except in the interval of a present moment. On the other hand, we also think of action time as a dynamic dimension that is all about the present moment, which changes and evolves into any number of possible futures. Just as we watch the second hand intervals of a clock evolve into as seemingly determinate future, we also imagine time in our experience of action that involves many possible futures. 

Our past is a series of moments or intervals like the frames of a video camera, but the present is a action without a determinate future or fate awaiting us in predetermined future frames. But is a moment of interval time accumulating as a past memory or a moment of action time counting down into a possible future?

After all, we know time as both the predictable frames of a DVD movie and the unpredictable moments of a life stage play. A moment of time is like the tick of a clock or the recursive neural cycle of our brain or a heartbeat. Unlike the past events of interval time, a moment of action time is a dimension of the present. Action time allows any number of possible futures and the future is not therefore predetermined.

Action time as a dimension is a very intuitive and understandable concept of a slowly changing universe and interval time is likewise rather clear in defining the present moment with the short period of atomic time. While action time is very slow, the intervals of atomic time are very fast and that is a little confusing since we really only seem to know time as a single fast atomic time dimension that is a past experience of action. In other words, time is in some sense two dimensional, but our memory of time is only of a norm or of a proper time. Yet there is both an action time and an interval time for all source change as orthogonal dimensions. 

Roughly speaking, action time represents the aether decoherence of past, present, and future while interval time represents the dynamic and immediate atomic time for an action in the present. Although we think of matter as largely static, just like time, all matter has both a slowly changing as well as a rapidly changing dimension. Our concept of matter as a single dimension of mass comes from the measurement of the gravity mass for a source, but the mass of a source is also in constant evolution as it exchanges matter with other sources. This second dimension for matter is a more dynamic dimension that is how sources exchange matter with each other. 

Matter as an axiom, you see, is ultimately defined only by both time and action. 

Dipole light is an oscillation of charge and light's color and polarization oscillate orthogonal to its propagation direction. Light is therefore a matter wave spectrum that is the dynamic exchange that bonds sources to observers in the universe. When light propagates, there is a complementary quadrupole biphoton exchange that bonds the matter left behind. Propagating light always has an entangled complementary photon and that biphoton quadrupole is in exchange with the boson matter from which space emerges. When an observer absorbs light from a source, that exchange bonds observer to source for some period of time.

Pairs of light photons called biphotons also represent a coherent quadrupole of neutral oscillation. The quadrupoles of biphoton light represent the propagation of matter amplitude as neutral gravity force. Each source also exists as a matter wave, both as a propagation of matter amplitude and an oscillation of that amplitude in time orthogonal to its propagation. The oscillations of matter waves from sources are extremely high frequency and therefore do not often impact our prediction of action. We like to think of a source that is not moving as stationary, but even stationary sources are comoving with an inertial frame of reference and undergo constant exchange and action with the boson matter of the universe.

Primal axioms or beliefs are a necessary and sufficient basis for closing the laws of the universe and anchoring the spectrometer of consciousness. We each need such primal beliefs to anchor and calibrate the spectrometers of our consciousness. Sometimes people feel as though they have no primal beliefs, but that is simply not true. The matter spectrometer of consciousness measures certain properties of sources, but first of all there must be primal beliefs to anchor the qualia of conscious thought. Qualia are the measured properties of sources, a red color for example, and our memory of sources relates them to other sources according to their common qualia.

Consciousness only begins when we calibrate our matter spectrometer with beliefs or axioms, because it is those beliefs that allow us to make sense out of the world. Neural recursion is the basic mechanism of thought, but without a set of primal beliefs, we cannot make sense out of the world. In order for people to engage in a useful discussion about the universe, they must have an understanding and agreement about their primal beliefs. Without some understanding of each other’s primal beliefs along with a common language and how their matter spectrometers are calibrated, people usually end up arguing about their primal beliefs even though the discourse was ostensibly about some other attribute of reality.

For example, a discourse about a philosophy of time will not be very useful unless there are complementary and compatible philosophies of the other axioms of matter and action, the other primal beliefs of the universe. Before discussing time, we need some manner of defining the lonely nothing that we call empty space and so there would need to be a philosophy of space as well. Two primal beliefs are the fundamental dimensions or axioms of reality from which a third emerges and it is only possible to define each primal with the other two primals. Since time is primal, time is defined as a combination of the other two primals, matter and action.

We often use an action, such as the tick period of a clock, to define interval time but time is also the decoherence of that tick interval over action time and an action of those tick intervals recorded by the hands of a clock. Time as a primal axiom is not really like any single thing and the definition of time is only in terms of other two primal axioms; matter and action. The axiom of time therefore includes both a matter moment such as a tick interval and an action that accumulates those ticks such as on the hands or display of a clock.

We can describe the action of a tick interval as a moment of matter that decoheres as an action time, which is the amount of matter that defines the interval of a tick along with a decoherence rate. For an hourglass, a matter moment would quite naturally be the mass of a grain of the sand. For a ticking clock, it would be the matter equivalent energy of the balance wheel resonance of the clock's mechanism. Thus an increment of matter defines a metric for a moment or interval time and it is the integration of those matter moments that becomes action time.

The second is our fundamental unit of time and is formally set as 9,192,631,770 or about nine billion cycles of the cesium 133 atom hyperfine resonance. There are then 86,400 seconds in every solar day and each tick of the atomic clock then also represents a very small matter equivalent energy of 1.1e-41 kg as a matter moment. The accumulation of these tiny moments over one year amounts to the action of about three hundred hydrogen atoms.

The matter spectrometer that we call consciousness samples reality as matter spectra of single moments that we call the present. We remember matter spectra of present moments that we call the past and use those memories to predict the many possible actions that we call the future. The prediction of many possible futures is a dynamic notion of time called A time while the memory of present moments is a static notion of static or B theory of time. 

Our notion of static time makes it seem like the future is also also frozen into moments that just wait to be played like a movie already recorded in Kronos time. This is the karma or fate of a determinate universe. Our notion of dynamic time, however, makes it seem like there exist an infinity of infinitely divisible present moments from which emerges an infinity of possible futures. The universe of discrete aether has two dimensions of time that emerge from both memories of past actions along with the emergence from the present moment of a large but finite number of possible futures. A two dimensional A-B time emerges from the discrete action of discrete aether as just a possibility from each moment.

An A-B time avoids the knife edge of a present moment that is squeezed by the A time past and future and A-B also avoids the messy infinity of B-time moments. Time is therefore not just a moment of matter, as A time, and time is not just an integration of matter moments, as B time, A-B time is really both matter moments and their action. The matter moment defines an interval and a relationship among the actions that we remember as past experience.

This interval might be the discrete ticks of a clock, the discrete sand grains of an hourglass, the discrete pulses of an atomic clock, the passage of discrete days, or the discrete neural recursion of human thought. The discrete memory of action can be in the positions of clock hands, the sand in the hourglass, the count of an atomic clock, the calendar of days, in the memory that we have of events, or in the possible futures that we imagine. But time itself is inextricably both discrete matter moments and the integration of those moments as discrete memories of discrete actions.

An hourglass keeps time with the passage of grains of sand as hourglass ticks as well as with an accumulation of those grains as the action of the lower hourglass along with a loss of grains in the upper hourglass. Time is neither action alone nor matter alone, but time has the two dimensions of both action and matter just as an hourglass is the relationship between an amount of sand and the matter of a single grain of sand. Likewise any definition of time necessarily includes the two dimensions of both matter and action. The sand in the hourglass bottom is a memory of the integrated gain or loss, the sand in the top is one of many possible futures, and each grain of sand through the neck defines the matter moment of that clock, its tick.

Neural time is how we tell the difference between the sources that we remember as our past and the actions that we imagine as possible futures. Our memories of a past action exist as matter in our minds as does how we imagine the future and the neural packets of consciousness differentiates those memories of action from the actions that we imagine for our possible futures. Just like time, we are conscious of both the matter of our memory and the neural packets of our thought. Once anchored, a time-like consciousness is why we are self-aware and why we believe that we exist with a purpose. The matter of our memory is the action of our past while the action of our neural recursion defines the matter of our neural moment.

• Recursion of time: Because we see other people act just like we act, we believe we are conscious, and since we are conscious, we imagine and choose desirable futures by acting just like other people act.

The definition of time as a series of moments from past to present to future is quite natural and intuitive. However, similar to the definition of space as a mostly empty void with only the volume of an occasional source, time might then also be mostly a timeless void except for occasional moments. But timeless, arbitrary eternities do not emerge to separate time moments and it is therefore curious that space emerges as an infinitely divisible empty void to separate sources. In contrast to an empty space with occasional sources, moments of time are what connect actions to each other with a common matter moment which gives each moment a composite of past and present as well as possible futures.

However defining time as only a series of time moments generates paradoxes and the philosophy of time has a long history of a discourse about exactly what a moment of time means. Is time a forward stream of events with only a present moment, the dynamic A time, or is time a patchwork of separate moments, the static B time? Is there a future action as a mement waiting for us to arrive, the karma or fate of a B time movie, or are there many possible future actions and we choose the futures we like from the moment that we are in, the quantum free will of an A time live play? Although the script of an A time play is determinate, the execution of a live A time play has many possible futures.

In aethertime, time is a primal axiom and time is not like any single thing except the other two axioms of matter and action. Time is not just the action of a moment in a live A time play nor is time just a series of frozen moments in a  B time movie; rather time is like a series of matter moments within an action. Time is both a moment and an accumulation or loss of those moments and we project moments and remember sources and actions much like the stop action of the freeze frame of a video camera.

But unlike a movie, what we play back in our mind is a highly selective and relational memory of an event that also incorporates the fading memory of a lifetime of related experiences into the action of thought. We tie every moment of time to a large number of related memories and possible futures and our experience of time is as much in those related but fading memories and possible futures as it is in the immediate sensations-feeling-action recursion of thought. We playback memories not as a DVD but with a selective focus on making predictions and choosing actions that help us survive and achieve our purpose.

The neural recursion of sensation-feeling-action in our minds generates neural packets that become the matter of our memory of an event. Memories of related experiences are an active part of neural recursion and so we relate the immediate neural recursion of the present to many past remembered events and form a relational memory of that new experience. With the power of our mind and memory, we project reality as a series of static moments and interpolate when our sensations cannot resolve an action or there is missing information.

Time moments are just a projection of our decohering memory of events and so moments are what we think of as time, but time is more than just the memory of moments and prediction of possible futures. Time is actually both the memory of moments as action and the decoherence of those memories as a matter moment that is the tick of our consciousness clock. The function of consciousness is time-like as is the space around us, but it is quite difficult to think about our homuncular recursion of time.

The homunculus is a little person inside of our minds that is looking at what we are looking at and so the homunculus is simply a restatement of the fundamental recursion of consciousness. A homunculus, though, also has a homunculus that is also looking at the same thing, and so on. This neural recursion represents the feedback of our brain and is a basic property of thought.

When we look at our own homunculus, though, we engage in a recursion or eternal recursion of sensation-feeling-action, since we look at homunculus, homunculus looks at itself and its homunculus at itself, and so on. If our homuncular recursion does not converge, just like any neural recursion in our brain that does not converge, the homuncular notion of self will make no sense and we simply will not understand and therefore will not learn the homuncular recursion of self as a truth. We will only recognize our self as different from the world if we the homuncular recursion makes sense.

We project experience from neural action and memory into a series of moments that we naturally interpret as time, but time is more than just memories. This natural view of time as memories of experience is one where we can overlook the many conundrums and paradoxes of that projection as long as we can adequately predict future action. Prediction of action is, after all, what is really important and a key to our survival and the discovery of the meaning of our lives. Evolution therefore favors any mental devices that permit us to better predict action and therefore imagine the many possible futures. Consciousness correspondingly overlooks a large number of illusions and mistakes in perception of sources as long as consciousness achieves the primary goals of survival and purpose.

All sources in the universe are a certain time distance or delay away from their observers and every source relates to the many possible futures of all other sources. Although we remember sources from our past and imagine many of those same sources in our possible futures, we can only ever journey to a future source. Sources in our past are only memories and there is no action that journeys to a memory.

We can imagine a Cartesian journey that returns to a source that we visited in the past, but such a return will not be to the same source nor along the same path. A journey to return to a source in our past is a future action with a different path to an evolved and therefore different source. All time paths journey to future sources but there is no time path to a past memory. It is rather the projection of a Cartesian return to a spatial source that misleads us to imagine that we might return to a past time.

Although we can imagine that Cartesian space does not evolve and change over time, the reality is that space does continually evolve and change. Any space to which we return at some later time, t, on the surface of our planet is a much different space than when our journey began at time zero. Even if we somehow remained fixed in a place within the cosmic microwave background, our most absolute cosmic reference frame, the very nature of space still evolves because of the universal decoherence of matter.

The Cartesian separation is really a time separation and what we imagine as the lonely nothing of empty space is simply a time-like projection of our minds. Similar to the hands and ticks of a clock, a walk through a park is a journey in time that involves exchange of matter and each exchange of a matter particle provides a tick of the integrated action that separates observer from source.

Complementary with time, matter and action are what make up the universe and matter and action are what bonds sources together and matter and action are also what we project as the lonely nothing of empty space. Matter and action along with time are the three irreducible properties (or axioms or qualia) of our universe and matter and its action in time are what make up the universe.

Time is not like anything and matter is also not like anything and definitions of matter are circular unless they incorporate the other two primal axioms. If we say that matter is a substance, for example, a substance is just another word for matter. Matter is an axiom and therefore only the differential of action and time defines matter.

Action completes the trimal of matter, time, and action that together describes our world as a matter pulse in time. An action necessarily involves integration of matter over time and even when we imagine sources as stationary and not moving, those sources still evolve and still change. Just like any source, though, a thought represents a highly relational neural spectrum within the set of 100 billion neurons in our mind and so our thoughts are also sources that are co-moving and evolving through space.

Therefore, the trimal of matter, time, and action completely describes the evolution of our reality along with the evolution of our universe. Just as time inexorably advances in matter, matter likewise inexorably decoheres over time and matter’s decoherence complements an increase in the atomic clock tick rate. Although there are many sources that are co-moving with us that we call stationary, no source is ever really static and unchanging. Change and evolution are a part of all existence and part of the nature of the universe.

Even though we can imagine an unchanging and static source remaining perfectly still on the surface of earth, that source is nevertheless comoving with the earth’s surface, rotating about earth’s axis, in orbit about the sun and galaxy center, and moving through the universe. And, the source’s matter exchanges and decoheres and that evolution occurs along with the ever-increasing forces that hold sources together.

Most words that we use to define time are in fact just synonyms for time and defining a word with a synonym is circular or recursive. For example, among the fourteen definitions of time in Merriam-Webster are these two:

      a. the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues: duration.

      b. a non-spatial continuum of events that succeed one another from past through present to future.

Although it is often useful to define a word with its synonyms, more typically a definition is a short description or story about what the source is like. However primal axioms are not like anything other than all other primal axioms as a description. The primal definition of time is as the differential of action with matter, matter is as the differential of action with time, and action is the integration or product of matter in time. As with any integration, action necessarily has a constant or offset and that simply means that action can be either bound to a rest frame or free in a moving frame.

The Merriam-Webster definitions of time incorporate actions, but only implicitly include matter and a definition of time as an axiom must have both action and matter. The words period or duration or continuum or progression of events or the past through present to future are all pretty much synonyms for time and so definitions with these words are equivalent to defining time as time, which is an identity. The accumulation of those actions as matter is an implicit part of these definitions.

When we say that time is a sequence or series of matter actions in space, unlike backing up in space, we cannot back up or go back in time and travel to the past. When we define time as both matter and action, then it is clear that we can only ever choose a future and never a past action. It is typical to describe a word such as time by the sources or ideas that it resembles and time is action divided by matter, which is an integration of matter, action, divided by the tick matter moment.

To complete a definition of time as a series of moments, we need the action of consciousness. The neural recursion of sensation-feeling-action is a homuncular recursion that is the action of consciousness. Independent of any mind, time is the action of sources along with the accumulation of those actions as matter, a duration. Every action of time is tied to a large number of related moments just as each tick of a clock is related to the accumulation of those ticks in the action of the hands of the clock or in its display.

The natural moment of earth is in the length of the day and the action of a year, properties that are tied to the solar system. The natural tick of matter is the frequency of the atomic clock, some nine billion cycles per second. The natural decoherence of that tick, though, is with classical universal decoherence of 0.26 ppb/yr, and so that means the atomic clock gains about one second every 124 years. The neural recursion of our brain, runs at about the rate of our heartbeat, 1.6 Hz and our lives decohere at about 1.3%/yr for an 80 year lifetime.

We naturally project the future and past into opposing Cartesian dimensions and this is where our projection of Cartesian space misleads us about time. Matter time shows that we project a three dimensional Cartesian space from time and not the other way around.

We project journeys in opposite directions in each of three Cartesian dimensions as forward and backward, up and down, and left and right. However, our journeys in Cartesian space first of all are actions that involve the exchange of matter over time and the integral of that change is the action that separates us from other sources. So a journey from one source to another is an evolution of our matter spectrum and our relations and interactions with other sources are what separate us from those sources. The empty space that we imagine separates sources is just a projection of time as action divided by matter.

Journeys on the surface of the earth have a beginning and duration and when we return to a journey’s starting place on earth’s surface, we naturally imagine that we might go back in time to a past memory of that source and of that place as well. However, when we return to the beginning of a journey, the earth and its surface are actually at very different places about its axis, about the sun, about the galaxy, and through the universe.

It is much simpler for us to project that we have returned to the same relative place in a comoving space but that is clearly not really so. The place to which we return is both a different space as well as a future time with evolved sources.

In astronomy and cosmology, a light year is the distance that light journeys in a year and is a very common measure of distance in the cosmos. In fact, all distance is equivalent to time because the speed of light does not depend on the relative velocity between two sources. The ticks of an atomic clock are therefore very precise and provide very accurate measures of spatial distance even for quite small distances. In fact, with the much lower velocities of human experience, it is quite common for people to describe distance as the time that a journey takes, like a twenty-minute commute to work or a ten-minute drive to the store.

Einstein described time as a fourth spatial dimension in order to explain an odd characteristic of light in space. Einstein showed why the velocity of light for a stationary observer does not depend on the velocity of the source of that light. In fact, Lorentz first derived the equation that showed the contraction of space by time that Einstein used in relativity. It was Michelson and Morley who first measured a constant speed of light that was independent of relative velocity and the Lorentz contraction of space was consistent with this observation. Einstein used Lorentz’s projection and then added time as a fourth dimension to our three dimensional space, thereby deriving a four-dimensional space time that has had many far-reaching consequences.

However, to explain the constant velocity of light, we could instead presume that light is in some sense stationary and it is us and our comoving sources that are in motion at the speed of light. In such a reinterpretation of reality, distance and separation would be necessarily time-like and matter exchange would describe all relations among sources. Time would not be just one of four spatial dimensions as it is in GR, time would instead describe all distance and the action of matter would be what we call Cartesian space that would provide Lorentz invariance. The projection of a three-dimensional Cartesian space is a very useful device of our imagination, but space would not therefore be necessary to predict action.

We both remember and imagine time by counting and recording actions such as heartbeats or footsteps, which are both about one per second, or we count the ticks of a clock at about two per second.  The sand grains from an hourglass fall at several per second and if we count the resonances of an atomic clock, they number about nine billion per second.

By counting and remembering past heartbeats we imagine that our future heartbeats will add to a past count, but we know that we decohere at 1.3%/yr on average. Thus a clock as time always includes two fundamental qualia for definition: a matter moment, such as a tick, and the accumulation or loss of those moments as action, such as the hands of a clock face. In a similar manner as a clock, a calendar counts, records, and anticipates the number of days, weeks, months, and years of our lives. Time is a reflection of consciousness and provides order for our past as well as order for the possibilities of our future.

We periodically adjust our clocks in order to keep them aligned to the natural cycle of the solar year, but we naturally presume that the tick rate of our atomic clock is otherwise constant. In matter time, our clocks tick 0.26 ppb/yr faster each year. We further interpret the past relics of ancient civilizations and the fossils of past earth as the cycles of eons and epochs of that same constant of atomic time.

Our memory or record of past heartbeats and our imagining of the possibility of future heartbeats is what we call time and time is therefore a dimension that we think of in the same way that we think of space. In reality, we should really think of space as a manifestation of time and not the other way around. Time differentiates a memory of a past action, which is simply a fossil record within the matter of our brain, from the imagining of a possible future action, which is an action of neural impulses. Therefore time is the progression or sequence of action in our lives and so just as space is time-like, our consciousness is also time-like.

Our memory of the count of moments is how we keep track of time and we project our past and future actions as a calendar of events. In all past action, time was equivalent to a distance between sources as well and when we imagine possible future actions, we also imagine a calendar for future actions in a way very similar to the past. This time order very effectively allows us to remember the past as a progression of events and to imagine and predict future events by projecting that memory of the past.

Our science has long known that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference and this has always been difficult to understand and communicate. If a light source moves, doesn’t the light from that source also then move? In fact, the light from either a traveler or a twin with different relative velocities has the same velocity even though each person’s light will appear as a bluer or redder color depending on whether they are moving closer or apart, respectively.

Einstein resolved these various conundrums associated with the speed of light by imagining time as a fourth spatial dimension. According to Einstein, in order for the speed of light to remain constant in all frames of reference, atomic time necessarily varies between two people with different relative velocities. As a result, he also showed that the relative velocity between two people distorts or curves the Cartesian space between them and both of these predictions have been repeatedly verified with observations.

But there is another way to resolve the conundrum of constant light speed. In matter time, space essentially shrinks at the speed of light and it is this shrinking of space that determines all force and also makes it appear that the speed of light is constant in a comoving frame of reference. Ironically, the traveler motion decreases the shrinkage of space ahead and increases the shrinkage of space behind the traveler. This means that the traveler cannot detect a change in light’s velocity although the frequency of the light does change.

Einstein did not talk about any relation between time and memory and imagination and he also did not discuss what would happen if space was not axiomatic in our reality. What if space where a projection of time and matter and not axiomatic? The past is not only in our biological memory; the past is also in the fossil memories of past action. There is no action that rewinds reality and so we can not go back in time because until the end of the universe, there is no action without a reaction. Action can only create new memories and new fossils for the future.

Nevertheless we can imagine actions that rewind time because of our Cartesian projection. Poincaré, in fact, proposed that any system of particles in seemingly chaotic motion will still cycle back to the same initial state with some probability, i.e. all systems show a possible reversal in time. However, Poincare’s proposition assumes that the particles and their space do not evolve or change with time. In matter time, space and matter both evolve in time and that means that Poincaré’s hypothesis is therefore based on different axioms from matter time.

Time is just one of the three primal axioms of matter, time, and action and time is simply the quotient of matter by action, the clock count divided by its tick action. Time differentiates memory from imagination and while we remember a past time as a count of actions, we imagine a future time as a distance in space, a collection of matter ticks on a aether clock. Thus, our memory of past time is just the marker of matter while we imagine a future time that has both matter and action. 

Since we project Cartesian paths with opposing directions as we journey forward and backward, up and down, left and right, it is quite natural to project time with opposing directions as well. We organize time from the present as a past into a future, but we actually project space from time and not the other way around. We project our memory of past sources and actions into a path in space, typically a straight line, and we project a future action into the opposite direction in space from our past.

Any future action between sources involves a change in the time distance with action and so there is no sense to a journey to a memory. A journey always involves actions that are positive time distances in a chosen direction and a future action is only one of many possible actions and those possibilities are always in our future and never in our past. Once we experience the single reality of what a source did become, it is that single reality that we remember as a past moment and the many other possible futures for a source simply decoheres away.

Time as a dimension is then simply the distance between sources and time is an accumulation of matter, divided by the aether action metric. As our heart beats, the distance between heartbeats defines both a time and what we project as space. Even though we may stand perfectly still on the surface of the earth, the earth rotates about its axis, about the sun, around our galaxy, and within the universe. All action on earth defines time as distance and the loss or gain of matter with action. The events of our past are simply memories or relics or fossils of what did occur even as we imagine the possibilities of what might occur in a possible future action.

From the action of sources from time delays, we project a three dimensional universe with sources on continuous time trajectories and we predict action both very precisely and very accurately with continuous space and time. We have an innate notion of a continuous void of empty space and Euclid defined the first geometric axioms some 2,300 years ago in ancient Greece and those same axioms are a fixture of our science and engineering even today. Euclid’s right angle is still the cornerstone of our Cartesian reality even though Cartesian space loses meaning for sources at very small and very large scales. The more primitive dimensions of discrete matter, time delay, and action as matter exchange have meaning for all sources in the universe. The primitive reality of matter time augments our understanding of reality for sources that exist in the realities of frozen space and time.

We know about a source in either of two complementary ways. A very common and intuitive understanding of physical reality projects a source on an event path relatively unperturbed by other forces, which is a straight line in Cartesian space or a parabolic trajectory on earth. However, we actually sense or perceive a source by what it might become, i.e., by sensing some of its many possibilities, and not by what that source actually is.

Our sensations represent just a very small number of a source’s possible futures and the totality of those possibilities is a complementary representation of that source. Yet even with the very small number of possible futures that we actually sense, we imagine quite a large number of possible futures, even those that do not actually make sense. By seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and/or touching, we sense a source as a very large number of possible futures as opposed to what the source actually is.

That source might not move or it might be moving, it might change color, or it might even disappear or suddenly change its form. We imagine the reality of a source on the basis of a rather limited number of our sensations of the source’s possibilities, but we relate that source to similar sources from a lifetime of experience with similar sources. Because of our past experience, we do not normally need to sense very many possible futures for a source in order to accurately predict that source’s actual future, but we can be and often are fooled by our sensations.

There are in fact many illusions that fool us just as there are also very many unlikely futures for a source that surprise us as well. So our imagining of a source on an event trajectory represents a convenient and succinct way for us to reliably predict that source’s future in our universe.

The rigid Cartesian reality that we project in our minds can make it very difficult to understand time since space is a projection of time. When we project a source onto an event trajectory, we also project the context of a Cartesian space as having a forward and a backward and therefore an opposing dimension. Quite naturally we project time backwards as a spatial displacement into the past, but we first projected a Cartesian displacement from time as a useful prediction of action. Action, after all, only ever moves us closer to or further from other sources.

We can actually never return to the place where we began a journey because that place no longer exists in the universe. We could imagine getting on a spacecraft and reaching a relative velocity that would maintain a place in a universal or proper space despite the rotation of earth about its axis and about the sun and about the galaxy and through the universe. However, the universe itself is shrinking in size and matter and so the universe would change even if we somehow remained in one place in space.

We are so accustomed to return journeys on the surface of earth that we do not realize that every action that we take on earth involves an opposite reaction by the earth. When we jump up from earth, she falls down away from us. When we step in one direction, mother earth backsteps in the opposite direction of our stride. Our forward is her backward and our backward is her forward.

The actions of our footsteps and of our heartbeats represent not only the duration or time of a past journey, but actions also represent a Cartesian distance for that past journey. Each footstep is an action for us as an observeron an event trajectory that was a part of a past journey. The memory of footsteps as an accumulation of space allows us to imagine a future journey among a large number possible journeys given a variation of our future footsteps.

During a walk or run, we can turn around and change direction or we can speed up or slow down to avoid obstacles, all without any concern for the effect our stride has on earth’s rotation about its axis or earth’s orbit about the sun or earth’s place in the galaxy or indeed earth’s place in the universe. And yet all of our choices during a walk do affect the earth’s rotation as well as earth’s orbit about the sun as well as the sun’s path through the galaxy, not to mention our galaxy’s journey in the universe. Although the impact of our stride on the earth is quite small, we can think of changes in time instead of changes in distance.

                                     

When we look up in the sky at night, we see only the fossil light of the past. The distance of a source that we see is the time it takes for its light to reach us and so the speed of light as a constant defines all distance as time. Every meter that light travels is about three billionths of a second or three nanoseconds, one nanosecond per foot of light travel. That constant speed of light associates an interval time with a distance and is as if everyone walked with the same speed or had exactly the same heartbeat.

A second time dimension, an interval time, represents the perpendicular distance between a source and a reference direction and along with the rotation or phase of the source around that reference direction projects that source into our Cartesian space. Thus, these two dimensions of time and one dimension of phase provide an equivalent representation of our Cartesian space with a time map instead of a Cartesian map. Our earth frame of reference usually provides us with a reference direction along with many other sources as landmarks.

Since the perpendicular distance between a source and a reference direction is always positive, it is the second time dimension, interval time, along with the phase or rotation of a source about the reference direction that determines a source’s direction. Cartesian space is, then, just a convenient projection of a two-dimensional time universe with phase. We imagine that there are two opposing directions for each of three Cartesian dimensions when in fact Cartesian space is just a projection of matter, time, and phase.

The right angle or 90°of Euclidean geometry is equivalent to the π/2 phase angle between time and matter. The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics involves a phase relationship between matter and time that is a complex number, -i, which derives from the the same 90° phase angle that is the right angle of Euclidean space. In matter time, Euclidean geometry reduces to a basic action equation of our quantum universe, the Schrödinger equation.

A time map of a source involves two time dimensions that we project into a Cartesian plane. There is an interval time as the distance to a source and an interval time as a separation of that source from a reference direction and a phase or rotation of that source about that reference direction. We project a three dimensional Cartesian reality from two dimensions of time, event and interval time distances, and one dimension of phase or angle about a reference direction.

Now what exactly does it mean to have two dimensions of time? Very simply put there is an action time and an interval time and action time is the particular time associated with an universe action and interval time is an orthogonal atomic time associated with the co-moving source frame of reference. Matter-time’s reinterpretation of reality with two time dimensions and a phase is very different from Einstein’s approach that begins with Cartesian space and then projects time a fourth spatial dimension. Einstein imagined a four-dimensional reality called space time with only a single time dimension along with our three Cartesian dimensions.

The recursion of time in relativity results in a great deal of complex mathematics called tensor algebra. Since Cartesian space is a projection from time, it is distorted by time and adding time as a fourth dimension time mixes back with itself in a recursion that forms the basis of space time. Matter time has instead just three dimensions, two of time and one of phase.

Although the dilations of time and therefore of space between sources traveling at different relative velocity are identical between matter time and space time science, the existence of two time dimensions in matter time complements the two dimensions for all matter as well. Given a common phase between time and matter, matter and time exist in a kind of holographic reality that defines our universe as a complex Fourier transform between the universe as a pulse of matter in time and the universe as a spectrum of matter amplitudes.

In space time, the speed of light is constant and relative velocity distorts time and space between a traveler in motion with respect to a stationary twin. In matter time, light is in a sense stationary and it is actually sources of matter that move away from a light source at the speed of matter. Sources never move faster than the speed of light because motion in one direction slows the matter collapse along that great circle of the universe. In effect, our co-moving velocity is at the speed of light in all directions and once matter has slowed completely down, it then becomes light.

The collapse of matter in time is a constant of matter time called m_dot, and determines both gravity and charge force. Along with two other constants and the Schrödinger equation, m_dot determines all forces and action for the matter-time universe and amounts to a decoherence of 0.26 ppb/yr or a gain of about one second every 124 years of the 9 billion ticks per second atomic clock.

When the accretion of matter is greater than some amount, Einstein’s four-dimensional space collapses into a black hole singularity, which is a very unusual but well accepted characteristic of space time. A black hole represents a singularity of space time where no light can escape, time literally stands still at its surface, and inside of the black hole, the laws of our physical universe no longer apply. It is very clear that astronomers have observed the effects of a number of very large matter accretions that center most galaxies, often termed supermassive black holes.

Science has more difficulty observing the much more subtle effects of smaller black holes that should form from the collapse of a class of stars known as supergiants. Moreover, the progression of a collapsed star known as a neutron star into the more massive black holes is very uncertain because of the role of angular momentum. It would appear that heavy, slowly rotating neutron stars might behave like black holes and that lighter, rapidly spinning black holes might behave like neutron stars.

Space time physics, then, is still an incomplete story for our universe and we await an improved story that includes the unification of gravity and charge forces. Such a story will likely not only close a chapter in our understanding of time and matter, it will open new disciplines for study.

In the prevailing paradigm of space time, space exists as an empty void that separates sources. The past memories and future imaginings that are in our minds represent sources that we separate by space, so consciousness is part of the source that is our mind. Our consciousness would then seem to exist as a source in time and we could then imagine a disembodied timeless mind. Consciousness would then be a convenient projection of space time and the same projection of consciousness would differentiate our memory of the past from our imagination of possible futures.

In matter time, the past memories and present thoughts that are in our minds are not just sources of matter, they are time-like. Memories are matter sources of action embedded in our brains, but the neural recursion of sensation-feeling-action is action-like. Our consciousness is therefore not just a matter source or an action, but really consciousness is the time-like differential of action with matter. Just like a two dimensional time, consciousness would then also have two dimensions; event consciousness and action consciousness.

Just as we have difficulty defining time and space, for the same reason we also have trouble defining the two dimensions of consciousness. Time and time-like concepts all share the characteristic that they are axiomatic and not really like anything except combinations of other axioms. However, we do not have similar difficulty defining the axioms of matter and action.

Matter is the static substance of all sources and so comprises the air, water, stone, soil, and fire of our alchemie. So all sources are like matter, but matter itself is an axiom and is only explicable as the product of action and time. We can easily imagine matter or we can just as easily imagine the empty void of space as not matter or nothing.

Action is the evolution of a source over time and so action is a very familiar and intuitive dynamic concept, just like matter is a static concept. We can easily imagine either action or the absence of action as a co-moving source that we think of as immobile or stationary.

However, when we imagine time, it is very difficult to imagine a complement to time as timelessness. What is timelessness like? The contrapositives of matter and action are straightforward with the opposite of matter as empty space and the opposite of action as inaction and it is only with these contrapositives that we can define timelessness. Timelessness is then the inaction of empty space, a definition of eternity, and once again, we find empty space linked to the contrapositive of time.

Timelessness is the inaction of empty space and represents a kind of eternity where time is the action of empty space. In fact, what we imagine separates sources in time is the aether and action that we project the action of aether as the empty void of space. We do experience timelessness during sleep, for example, or during other unconscious states. There is a rich language associated with timelessness: eternal, immortal, perpetual, everlasting, and so on. In fact, many of our religious traditions are embedded into the semantics of a timeless and perpetual eternity that addresses various transcendental questions.

We know that we are conscious because the sources and actions that we remember from our past are different from the sources and actions that we imagine in our future. That is time. The timeless nature of our dreams mixes memories and imaginings and in a final dream, the neural impulses of our conscious mind become progressively slower thereby stretching time out. In effect, the timeless nature of a final dream represents the eternity of a final and fading conscious thought. Our final dream ends in either a point of ecstasy for a life fulfilled or in the circle of despair for a life unfulfilled.

All sources that are in the universe are in our possible futures at a certain time distance away from us. Although we remember sources from our past, there is no journey that will take us to those past sources and time only projects sources into our possible futures.

One very odd thing about time is embodied in the principle of relativity, which is that atomic clocks tick more slowly as they travel away from or towards a stationary twin clock. If a traveler accelerates to 0.8 c on a journey from a stationary twin, in five years according to the stationary twin’s clock, the traveler will journey four light years away from the twin. However, during that journey, the traveler will only have aged three years and so after the traveler slows down to the twin’s inertial frame, it will seem to the traveler that that journey’s velocity, 1.2 c, was faster than the speed of light. The traveler aged 3 years during a journey of 4 light years and traveled faster than the speed of light in the twin’s frame of reference.

A traveler’s distance age can exceed the speed of light relative to the twin’s stationary frame of reference left behind. Once the traveler slows back to the twin’s inertial frame, the traveler has only aged three years while the twin has aged 5 years. Of course it will take 4 years to communicate that information back to the twin and 4 more years for the twin to acknowledge that communication and so the traveler will only know that this has occurred 8 years after reaching the destination.

We can and do describe the distance between sources in space by the time it takes light to journey between those sources. Therefore, we are conscious because there is a time distance between all sources for all actions in our universe, including our neural impulses. The sequence of neural impulses in our minds represents a time distance between neurons and therefore time is a part of our consciousness.

In space time, a universe of the lonely nothing of empty space is possible even without any matter, but in matter time, there can be no universe without matter. Just as no universe is possible without time, no universe is possible without matter and action, either.