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Relative to this concept of boundaries, the British philosopher G. Spencer-Brown, in his book "Laws of Form," taught:
"A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please."1.41
There is a similar hierarchy in the scriptures. If words are points, and phrases are lines, then passages are areas, books are volumes, and the books by different prophets show changes across time. Time is an important measurement in science and in religion. In fact, understanding time is at the heart of understanding the science / religion matrix.
The related paradox is the fact a new universe comes into being when a space or a time or a philosophy is severed or taken apart.18
Scientific temporal data includes textural strings,
animation sequences, vectors, ribbons, flows, and time-lapse data. As with
spatial textural data, the unlimited amounts of text available in databases
can be correlated to a time of data creation, a time of collection,
or to some other time stamp. The temporal location of text can be at a point,
along a line, or enclosed by an area. Animating images, such as rotation of
2-D data within a 3-D volume, data like the 2-D seismic sections as shown in
Figure 9, provides motion parallax, and gives the 2-D
data the appearance of being three-dimensional. Doing the same thing with 3-D
data allows studies of changes in volumes of data. These types of data are
beginning to be exploited with virtual reality and holographic display technologies.
Vectors are used to illustrate directions of movement and magnitudes of measured
attributes like velocity or acceleration. Ribbons have been effectively used to
show atmospheric data, like tornado or hurricane paths, or the location of the jet
stream. It is harder to capture data defining flows. The change in flow at one
point in a river is measured with a flow meter. Placing several flow meters on a
cross-section across the river allows capture of the data defining the flow of the
entire river. Similar measurements are made by scientists in space, in the atmosphere,
in lakes an rivers, in stratigraphic rocks, in volcanoes, in the mantle, etc.
Time-lapse 3-D seismic surveys allow measurement and comparison of how the fluid
boundaries within a study area change over time. This can have significant impact
on optimal production of complex hydrocarbon reservoirs, which has equally significant
economic implications.
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paradoxes