Patterns in Time and Space

“The way isn't a circle and never can be a circle unless you repeat the same after the same. Is it possible to find something new?...

The way is spiral, and I will keep believing in this!”  -Deyth Banger

There are four cycles of time in the year, the annual, the month, the week, and the day. 

The year and the week are “yang”, the day and the month are “yin”.

The year holds the solar seasons.

The month is based badly on the lunar cycles.

The week is a human devised cultural construction.

The day is Earth’s way of creating our day/night cycle.

Each cycle has its own rhythm. We dance and juggle our way through all of them simultaneously. Since these are cycles, there is really an arbitrary decision as to when we start and end them. We humans love to draw lines, measure things and make models. It feels empowering to anticipate and predict what we will be dealing with in the patterns we have noticed, and in the case of the week, created.

But the universe has no precise circles, they are all actually spirals, since we are also moving through time and space as well. So we never are in the same place each time our planet goes around the sun, because the whole solar system is hurdling through the galaxy, which is itself hurdling through the universe and so on. Spirals spiraling in spirals. 

Geometric models are giving way to far more complex fractal concepts. A geometric form such as a perfect line or circle or square, simply is not found in the universe. Fractals are simple algorithms that can spiral out, repeating endlessly into similar but never exactly identical formations. 

Days and nights spiral light and dark as the Earth spins. The weeks spiral through the months, which spiral through the years, which spiral on through time, patterning, but never exactly repeating. Also, we live in a moment of particular and ever increasing climate instability, which makes predictions based on past patterns hopeful and nostalgic at best.

That being said, pattern recognition is a deep built in impulse in our nature that is not going away.

“The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.” -Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I wonder where we will be at this time in the next spiral cycle.