The Hypersecond

Sometimes, it feels like the internet's talking to me, trying to tell me things. A moment ago, posting a comment on the latest post at Smoking Mirrors, the verification word was 'hypersec'. My brain couldn't help but interpret that as 'hypersecond', and then immediately after ask itself, 'what in the heck is a hypersecond?'

Time is a nonlinear, fractal thing. It is not the mere ticking of a clock: a clock is nothing more than a machine that attempts to bound infinity within a circle, slice it into arcs, and count them as they pass. A convention, a piece of sophistry, useful but not fundamental. No, time, if you really look at it, is history. Some moments have more of it than others, for in some little changes - little can change - whereas in others there is great ferment, great potential for change. There are moments that are full of peace, which achieve a kind of timelessness (or, one might better say, make the eternal timelessness more perceptible than usual); in other moments, chaos reigns, and since things can go off any which way nothing seems to last for very long at all.

Mathematically, one might picture the entire history of a universe as a vast static structure in an n-dimensional phase space, where n is the number of particles, and thus each point represents a potential material state of that universe. Time appears as connections between the points: points in close proximity to others are close in time, whereas points that are more distant are more separated in time. One might expect the structure that emerges to be very complex, with some points connected to a great profusion of other points, while some points stand all but isolated from the larger structure. The number of paths that can be negotiated through the structure are essentially infinite, each appearing to itself as a consistent and logical timeline.

There's also the possibility of a point from which all other points can be reached. Imagine if you will a sort of still center, a moment of infinite potential when literally anything can happen ... and so, from which, everything happens. It need not be merely the beginning of the universe (though it would be that), nor would it be the end (though in a very real sense it would be that, too.) Looking at such a moment as either the source or the goal of any given timeline wouldn't be quite correct, however; in and of itself, it has no essential superiority over any other moment, for all are equally necessary to the whole. Not a beginning or an end but rather a junction, where all moments meet and and from which any trajectory can be chosen. That moment is the hypersecond.