Parallels & Paradoxes

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Curiosity: there's a thing, and I don't mean in the sense of an enquiring mind. Curiosity in the sense of a paradoxical, baffling, or just plain off-the-wall-weird thing. It turns out that our apparently boringly average - in astrophysical terms - universe, may just be the way that it is because it's baby bear's porridge - ish; I think. Using clocks counting time in imaginary numbers, those that apparently know such stuff show how strange but simultaneously normal, and yet essentially intangible time is: non-linear, jumping about from time to place, and occasionally disappearing up its own fundament, just to reappear somewhere/time/place else -  a point without size or duration, completely different from its present/past place/time/size.

Space and time, as we think we might/should know, are inextricably linked in a conundrum of physics and philosophy that few completely - or should that be incompletely? - understand in anything less than the most abstruse of mathematically abstracted spaces (or times: but is that not in itself a paradox, as mathematics exists outside of time and space, entwined or otherwise?) Depends on the stringiness, or else-wise, of your theor(ies). The universe - at least this one - has a heartbeat. Is this a surprise? Is this a curiosity? Is it reality? Or none of the above? Your guess is as good as mine, but Alice knows full well...

[Source(s) of this knotty Ball of Confusion: Wired Online, Live Science, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll]

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