A screenshot of the Timewave Zero software.

Novelty theory attempts to predict the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. It is an idea conceived of and discussed at length by Terence McKenna from the early 1970s until his death in the year 2000. Novelty theory involves ontology, morphogenesis, and eschatology. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, density of complexification, and dynamic change as opposed to static habituation. According to McKenna, when "novelty" is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as timewave zero or simply the timewave results. The graph shows at what times, but never at what locations, novelty is increasing or decreasing. Screenshot of the Timewave Zero software graphing Terrence Mckennas novelty wave over a 25–year period. ... Screenshot of the Timewave Zero software graphing Terrence Mckennas novelty wave over a 25–year period. ... The universe from a speculative theoretical physicists point of view can be described as the sum of all matter and energy that exists and the space-time in which they are located and in which all events occur or could occur. ... Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was a writer and philosopher. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek , genitive : of being (part. ... Morphogenesis is also the name of a band. ... Look up eschatology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For the Computer Science term, see Computational complexity theory. ... The boundary of the Mandelbrot set is a famous example of a fractal. ...

From the perspective of peer-reviewed science, the theory lacks any credible basis, and is viewed thus as pseudoscience. Phrenology is regarded today as a classic example of pseudoscience. ...

Brief account

The timewave itself is a combination of numerology and mathematics. It is formed out of McKenna's interpretation and analysis of numerical patterns in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching (the ancient Chinese Book of Changes). This concept first took root in his entheogenic experiences shared by him and his brother Dennis McKenna as documented in the book True Hallucinations. The theory is clearly based in numerology and takes shape out of McKenna's belief that the sequence is artificially arranged as such purposely. Mathematically, the sequence is graphed according to a set of mathematical ratios, and displays a fractal nature as well as resonances, although it was not captured in a true formula until criticism from mathematician Matthew Watkins (see below). McKenna interpreted the fractal nature and resonances of the wave, as well as his theory of the I Ching's artificial arrangement, to show that the events of any given time are recursively related to the events of other times. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Euclid, Greek mathematician, 3rd century BC, known today as the father of geometry; shown here in a detail of The School of Athens by Raphael. ... The King Wen sequence of the I Ching is a series of sixty four broken and unbroken lines, representing yin and yang respectively. ... Alternative meaning: I Ching (monk) The I Ching (Traditional Chinese: 易經, pinyin y jīng; Cantonese IPA: jɪk6gɪŋ1; Cantonese Jyutping: jik6ging1; alternative romanizations include I Jing, Yi Ching, Yi King) is the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. ... This entry covers entheogens in the strict sense of the word (i. ... Dennis McKenna, born December 17, 1950, is an American ethnopharmacologist and author. ... // In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate with high amplitude when excited by energy at a certain frequency. ... A Sierpinski triangle —a confined recursion of triangles to form a geometric lattice. ...

The theory was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and McKenna's sources and reasoning were primarily what would be considered numerological rather than mathematical by professional mathematicians and scientists, the theory has failed to gain any (scientific) credulity or much recognition. However, McKenna was highly critical of such fields for adhering to what he saw as a flawed Western dominated paradigm, and did not seek to create a theory acceptable to the mathematical community. The theory was, however, revised by nuclear physicist John Sheliak after a flaw was discovered by Matthew Watkins. The new revision is often referred to as Timewave One, but is also inclusive in the set of alternate waves in the Timewave Zero software. This new version is also acclaimed to match history more accurately. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Euclid, Greek mathematician, 3rd century BC, known today as the father of geometry; shown here in a detail of The School of Athens by Raphael. ...

Timewave Zero received a great deal of its public attention through the publications of R. U. Sirius, particularly the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000. R. U. Sirius R. U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman) is an American writer, musician, and cyberculture icon best known as co-founder and original Editor-In-Chief of Mondo 2000. ... Cyberculture is a frequently and flexibly used term lacking an explicit meaning. ... Mondo 2000 #13 Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. ...

Precepts of novelty theory

Novelty theory has a few basic tenets:

• That the universe is a living system with a teleological attractor at the end of time that drives the increase and conservation of complexity in material forms.
• That novelty and complexity increase over time, despite repeated set-backs.
• That the human brain represents the pinnacle of complex organization in the known universe to date.
• That fluctuations in novelty over time are self-similar at different scales. Thus the rise and fall of the Roman Empire might be resonant with the life of a family within a single generation, or with an individual's day at work.
• That as the complexity and sophistication of human thought and culture increase, universal novelty approaches a Koch curve of infinite exponential growth.
• That in the time immediately prior to, and during this omega point of infinite novelty, anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.
• That the date of this historical endpoint is December 21, 2012, the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar. (Although many interpretations of the "end" of the Mayan calendar exist, partly due to abbreviations made by the Maya when referring to the date, McKenna used the solstice date in 2012, a common interpretation of the calendar among New Age philosophers, although this date corresponds to such an abbreviation rather than the full date. See Mayan calendar for more information on this controversy.)

This End of History was to be the final manifestation of The Eschaton, which McKenna characterized as a sort of strange attractor towards which the evolution of the universe developed. Teleology (telos: end, purpose) is the philosophical study of design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in nature or human creations. ... The Roman Empire is not the Holy Roman Empire (843-1806). ... // In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate with high amplitude when excited by energy at a certain frequency. ... The first four iterations of the Koch snowflake The Koch curve is a mathematical curve, and one of the earliest fractal curves to have been described. ... In mathematics, a quantity that grows exponentially is one whose growth rate is always proportional to its current size. ... Omega point is a term invented by French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to describe the ultimate maximum level of complexity-consciousness, considered by him the aim towards which consciousness evolves. ... December 21 is the 355th day of the year (356th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2012 (MMXII) will be a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Maya calendar is actually a system of distinct calendars and almanacs used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and by some modern Maya communities in highland Guatemala. ... New Age describes a broad movement characterized by alternative approaches to traditional Western culture. ... The Maya calendar is a system of complex and highly developed calendars created by the Maya Civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. ... Eschaton can refer to: The end of everything, as studied in the subject of eschatology. ... In the study of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set, curve, or space to which a system irreversibly evolves, if left undisturbed. ...

His predictions for this transcendent event were wide ranging and varied, depending on his audience, and different times he conjectured the following: the mass of humanity would, by means of some technology, become mentally conjoined in a great collective; the moment in which time travel became a reality; the birth of self-conscious artificial intelligence; a global UFO visitation; and occasionally he even expressed doubt whether anything at all would happen. However, McKenna claimed that there was no contradiction between these scenarios, as they might all happen simultaneously. Time travel is a concept that has long fascinated humanity—whether it is Merlin experiencing time backwards, or religious traditions like Mohammeds trip to Jerusalem and ascent to heaven, returning before a glass knocked over had spilt its contents. ... Hondas humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... A purported 1952 photo of a UFO over Passaic, New Jersey, from an FBI document. ...

Similar ideas

McKenna repeatedly describes human cultural development as a succession of historical periods which are "compressed" versions of each other. In this manner, he describes an overall acceleration of human cultural development, which he likens to a "tightening spiral" approaching what he describes as the "transcendental object of the universe".

The acceleration of human cultural development has been observed by other philosophers and historians, perhaps most notably Ray Kurzweil in his Law of Accelerating Returns. A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ... This is a list of historians. ... Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. ... When plotted on a logarithmic graph, 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. ...

See also Stuart Kauffman and his concept of "The Adjacent Possible"

Robert Anton Wilson has the theory of The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon, which he describes at an hour and a half long seminar given in 1988 titled "The Acceleration of Knowledge". He also theorizes that information has doubled over history, and that these doublings come faster and faster. The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon has more of a philosophical and historical basis than a scientific one, though many parallels between his theory and Timewave Zero can be drawn. It has been suggested that Timothy F.X. Finnegan be merged into this article or section. ...

Criticisms

There are several criticisms of novelty theory. Most contend that it is a sophistry based on a form of irrational scientism with pseudo-scientific premises and reasoning. Sophism (gr. ... Scientism is an ideology which holds that science has primacy over other interpretations of life (e. ... A pseudoscience is any body of knowledge purported to be scientific or supported by science but which fails to comply with the scientific method. ...

One criticism in this vein is that novelty is not defined in natural units. Another is that the supporting, corroborative arguments are based on subjective historical analysis. McKenna was adept at this, and Rupert Sheldrake complained that the theory required his personality for its demonstration. Another criticism is that the historical end point was chosen arbitrarily. Rupert Sheldrake Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, born 28th June 1942 [1] is a British biologist and author. ...

When the user quits Fractal Time 7.1 (the last software package written to demonstrate the theory, see below), the program prints the following message before exiting:

Perhaps the real value of novelty theory, at the end of the technological war-driven 20th century, is that it is a parody. It is not a scientific theory, nor is it a pseudo-scientific theory -- it is a parody of a scientific theory. It basically mocks the pretensions of 20th century physical science. It purports to explain the nature of time and to elucidate the inner workings of the temporal world, yet it is obviously absurd, at least to a more than superficial examination. Novelty theory says to us: This is what any Cartesian-Newtonian scientific theory really is -- basically absurd. And since it is absurd, we should not, and do not have to, believe. This basically knocks the foundations out from under the assumptions of modern Western society, built as it is on a faith in modern physical science as being the authority as to the nature of the real world. In this sense Terence McKenna's thought is both liberating and subversive. (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999... For alternative meanings for The West in the United States, see the U.S. West and American West. ...

This disclaimer was built into the program by its author, Peter Meyer. Terence McKenna is not known to have ever issued such a statement. Indeed, in his published books, interviews, and recorded lectures McKenna consistently treats the theory as seriously as any of his other material.

Despite it being generally ignored by the scientific community due to its basis in the I Ching and the Mayan Calendar, as previously mentioned, there were several mathematical criticisms which led to subsequent minor revisions of the model.

Software history

McKenna recruited Royce Kelley and Leon Taylor in 1974 to model the mathematical underpinnings of his theory. This was done in FORTRAN, on a CDC 6400 computer at UC Berkeley. Leon Taylor (born 2 November 1977) is a British athlete. ... 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... Control Data Corporation, or CDC, was one of the pioneering supercomputer firms. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ...

The first program for a personal computer was written in 1978 or 1979 by Peter Broadwell, an employee of Ralph Abraham. It was made for the Apple IIe, and was the first to represent the data points as a graph. It was difficult to manipulate. 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday. ... For the Smashing Pumpkins song, see 1979 (song). ... Ralph H. Abraham (born July 4, 1936) is an American mathematician. ... The Apple IIe was the third model in the Apple II line of personal computers, produced by Apple Computer. ...

In the late 1970s the German professor of mathematics and physics Klaus Scharff developed his own computer model based on the data sets in The Invisible Landscape, which he considered primitive. It was written in Pascal. The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ...

In 1985 programmer Peter Meyer was asked by McKenna to write a new version for the Apple IIe. After finding the original work vague, and inspired by the recent publications of Benoît Mandelbrot, Meyer reinterpreted the waveform as a fractal. He completed this new version in Applesoft BASIC for the Apple IIe in February 1987. It was the first piece of software to allow calculation of resonances. 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Dr. Benoît B. Mandelbrot, Ph. ... The boundary of the Mandelbrot set is a famous example of a fractal. ...

In 1989 he wrote the first MS-DOS version in Munich. It was written in C, supported multiple screens, and was much faster. It was also in German. 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... disk operating system (specifically) and disk operating system (generically), most often abbreviated as DOS, refer to operating system software used in most computers for the management of storage devices and the information on them (e. ... Munich: Frauenkirche and Town Hall steeple Munich: St. ...

In 1990 it was bought back by Meyer, rewritten to take advantage of the FPU, and published by his company Dolphin Software in 1991. In April 1991 a German version of the MS-DOS software was commissioned by Gaia Media in Switzerland. A new German language version, with various improvements in resonance rendering, was written and released in 1993. This article is about the year. ... A floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. ... 1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ...

In 1994 a newer English language version was written with even more improvements. 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal by United Nations. ...

In 1996 Matthew Watkins (founder of The RetroPsychoKinesis Project) published an objection which changed the underpinnings of the novelty theory, capturing the I Ching transform into a formula. A new DOS version was written by Meyer to incorporate this change in 1998. It was released as Fractal Time Version 6.72. 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ...

Physicist John Sheliak further revised the theory, and version 7.1 was subsequently released by Meyer in 1999. 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ...

The software is currently available at Peter Meyer's website: http://www.hermetic.ch/solo/frt.htm

For a complete history of the software see Peter Meyer's website: http://www.hermetic.ch/frt/hist.html

In 2006 a new timewave calculator was written in java and made available as an applet at http://www.timewave2012.com. This version allows for simultaneous viewing of multiple number sets as well as "resonating" back or forward in time (finding date ranges which have the same plot shape as the date range currently being viewed) 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• Mckenna's explanation of the Timewave
• The Mathematics of Timewave Zero
• The Watkins Objection
• A Mathematical and Philosophical Re-Examination by John Sheliak
• 2012 Eschaton Novelty Theory, Timewave, and Mayan Calendar
• Novelty & Concrescence – discussions of Novelty Theory in general terms
• The End Of The River
• Timewave links
• Yahoo! discussion group for Novelty Theory, Timewave Zero and 2012-related topics
• Peter Meyer's website for the Fractal Time software
• Timewave2012.com – software for calculating the timewave and forums for discussing research on Novelty theory and related subjects

• http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman03/kauffman_index.html