A suggestion pertaining to the nature of “time” and “temporal” awareness, based on the motion of Raleigh surface waves.

(Image created by Dan Russell – licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License)

In the above animation, let’s say that continuous experienced time appears to be flowing from left to right at the surface, yet the discrete particles near the surface that form this illusion (perhaps related to our short term temporal consciousness) are apparently flowing anti-clockwise (the top orange oval). At a deeper level (the lower oval) the direction of flow is in a clockwise motion, similar to that at the surface.

In the above model we seem to perceptually moving with time but effectively we are cycling through time reversal cycles, kinetic moments that transverse the longitudinal flow, with our deeper, long term & working memories all being tuned to the surface clockwise temporal illusion.

NB; In a Rayleigh surface wave, “particles at the surface trace out a counter-clockwise ellipse, while particles at a depth of more than 1/5th of a wavelength trace out clockwise ellipses” (Dan Russell)

This is not dissimilar to the growing block universe theory of time, with a past and present (no future), but by effectively reversing the direction of Zeno’s arrow, the concept of eternalism is retained.

We are all secretly (or not) fascinated by reversed sounds and images, inverse & retrograde isotropic symmetry. The above model might be described as walking on a tread mill, or into the wind. The older we get, the more effort it seems to take, and consequently time seems to pass at a more rapid rate (as anyone beyond a certain age will have noticed).