"Timewave Zero" redirects here. For album by Dutch Aggrotech band, Grendel, see Timewave Zero (album).
Novelty theory is a pseudoscientific idea[10][11] that purports to predict the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. Proposing that time is not a constant but has various qualities tending toward either "habit" or "novelty".[5] Habit, in this context, can be thought of as entropic, repetitious, or conservative; and novelty as creative, disjunctive, or progressive phenomena.[8] McKenna's idea was that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty and that as novelty increases, so does complexity. With each level of complexity achieved becoming the platform for a further ascent into complexity.[8]
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The basis of the theory was originally conceived in the mid-1970s after McKenna's experiences with psilocybin mushrooms at La Chorrera in the Amazon led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.[5][6][29]
In Asian Taoism philosophy the concept of opposing phenomena is represented by the Yin and Yang. Both are always present in everything, yet the amount of influence of each varies over time. The individual lines of the I Ching are made up of both Yin (broken lines) and Yang (solid lines).
When examining the King Wen sequence of the 64 hexagrams, McKenna noticed a pattern. He analysed the "degree of difference" between each successive hexagram and claims he found a statistical anomaly, which he believed suggested that, the King Wen sequence was an intentional construct. With the degrees of difference codified into numerical values, he worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams. McKenna was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave.[5]
Peter Meyer, in collaboration with McKenna, studied and improved the foundations of novelty theory, working out a mathematical formulaand developing the Timewave Zero software enabling them to graph and explore its dynamics on a computer.[5][7] The graph was fractal, it exhibited a pattern in which a given small section of the wave was found to be identical in form to a larger section of the wave.[3][5] McKenna called this fractal modeling of time "temporal resonance", proposing it implied that larger intervals, occurring long ago, contained the same amount of information as shorter, more recent, intervals.[5][85] He suggested the up-and-down pattern of the wave shows an ongoing wavering between habit and novelty respectively. With each successive iteration trending, at an increasing level, towards infinite novelty. So according to novelty theory, the pattern of time itself is speeding up, with a requirement of the theory been that infinite novelty will be reached on a specific date.[3][5]
McKenna suspected that notable events in history could be identified that would help him locate the time wave's end date[5] and attempted to find the best-fit placement when matching the graph to the data field of human history.[7] The last harmonic of the wave has a duration of 67.29 years.[86] Population growth, peak oil, and pollution statistics were some of the factors that pointed him to an early twenty-first century end date and when looking for an extremely novel event in human history as a signal that the final phase had begun McKenna picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.[5][86] This worked out to the graph reaching zero in mid-November 2012. When he later discovered that the end of the 13th baktun in the Mayan Calendar had been correlated by Western Maya scholars as December 21, 2012,[Note a] he adopted their end date instead.[5][87][Note b]
McKenna saw the universe, in relation to Novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time,[5] which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach asingularity of infinite complexity. He also frequently referred to this as "the transcendental object at the end of time."[5][7][88] When describing this model of the universe he stated that: "The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do that, you know the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, down, down – until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history. I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time, and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."[89] Therefore according to McKenna's final interpretation of the data and positioning of the graph, on December 21, 2012 we would have been in the unique position in time where maximum novelty should have been experienced.[3][5][29] An event he described as a "concrescence",[12] a "tightening 'gyre'" with everything flowing together. Speculating that "when the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow intophysis as its reflection...It will be the entry of our species into 'hyperspace', but it will appear to be the end of physical laws, accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination."[90]
Novelty theory is considered to be pseudoscience.[10][11] Among the criticisms are the use of numerology to derive dates of important events in world history,[11] the arbitrary rarther than calculated end date of the time wave[27] and the apparent adjustment of the eschaton from November 2012 to December 2012 in order to coincide with the Mayan calandar. It has also been claimed that other purported dates do not fit the actual time frames: McKenna's date for the emergence of Homo sapiens has been claimed to be inaccurate by 70,000 years, and the existence of the ancient Sumer and Egyptian civilisations contradict the date he gave for the beginning of "historical time". Some projected dates have been criticised for having seemingly arbitrary labels, such as the "height of the age of mammals"[11] and McKenna's analysis of historical events has been criticised for having aeurocentric and cultural bias.[6][27]