I’m not going into why I needed the following quad or how I use it at the moment. It’s not meant to be an actually correct model or anything anyway. Just something I wanted to have for a story and a fun way to look at Dramatica’s quad in a slightly newish kind of way. Almost everything I find interesting and useful about it should be pretty familiar to most Dramatica users already anyway. I was just surprised to come up with some of it when working out this quad-although possibly, or maybe probably, I came up with it because I am already familiar with Dramatica. Anyway, below are some notes I made on a Particle/Wave quad that describes not what we’re observing, necessarily, but how were observing it and it’s entirely based on work already done in Dramatica.
Note-There’s a note or two in the following where I mention points and lines. I’ve previously decided that physical space shouldn’t be described as length, width, and height, but as point, line, plane, and form. When I mention points and lines in the following, it’s in reference to that
Particle | Particle-Wave
Wave-Particle | Wave
Particle
A purely structural view, Particle views the entire image as a single unit-as opposed to a unit made up of multiple components. Particle sees no change or time unless it is seen structurally…all as one, all at once. For instance, the hands on a clock face over a twelve hour period when viewed sequentially would appear to point first one place, then another, and so on. But structurally, they would appear to point simultaneously to every point on the clock face.
Wave
A purely processorial view, Wave views only change, only energy, only time. One at a time, always in sequence. Nothing is ever steady or stable because even a solid structure that appears to be unmoving or unchanging is still experiencing temporal accumulation…waving through time. When looking at hands on a clock, Wave doesn’t even see the clock. It just sees motion from the springs and gears. It doesn’t see the hands, just the motion they have as they move around the clock face. It’s hard to separate physicality from energy in this way. It seems almost too conceptual. Easiest to think of it perhaps as a number, or an equation whose answer is constantly changing with constantly changing input into its variables. More practically, maybe it works to just think of it in terms of physical space. If Particle represents a zero-directional point, then maybe wave would be like the one-directional wave because in order to judge change as with time there needs to be a direction for it to travel. A line, or a vector, or a tendency.
Particle-wave
Particle-wave is like a particle acted on by, or acting as a wave. Where Particle sees an entire view as a single unit, the PW will spread the Particle out across a wave. At first this seemed like it might be like a surfer being pushed across the surface of the ocean. And in one sense, I think that works. But in another, it’s more like the wave tearing the surfer apart, for lack of a better analogy. If you take the idea of a clock and apply a wave to it, the idea of the clock might be represented by an entire wave. But if you zoom in on the wave, there would be smaller waves where you would find various components of the clock. Springs, gears, hands, etc (a quantity) and then the placement along the wave of each component should tell us something about the nature of the smaller component as it relates to the larger (a quality). And then if you zoom in further, you’d find smaller and smaller waves until you got down to quarks and atoms and electrons or whatever the smallest possible component would be. So the PW acts as a dividing force during observations. What’s particularly interesting is how we observe a similar dividing force in nature. It’s said that the fabric of space is expanding pushing galaxies further and further apart at a universal scale. This isnt seen, at least not in the same way, at a local level. (Although I guess we do see gases expand to fill a volume at a uniform pressure) Also, PW seems like it would be what we’re using to view time as a slice, or a series of moments, like a series of digital dots on a cd.
Wave-Particle
Wave-Particle is a wave acted on by or acting as a particle. Like the surfer being pushed across the surface of the ocean, a WP might describe the way in which a wave is “locked” in by a particle, perhaps seen as a system or mechanism through which the wave flows. Maybe like a car engine that uses heat and explosive forces. Perhaps the arrow of time is a view of a timeline acting as the particle that locks our view of time to a forward-moving direction. Another view of a WP might be like a wave that, rather than separating particles into smaller components, actually blends smaller components into larger ones by blurring the edges and erasing the dividing lines. Where a PW might look like a series of particles, or dots, plotted along the line of a wave shape, a WP might make a particle, or a series of individual particles, look more like a rainbow that, rather than coming to a harsh stop between divisions, gradually fades into the next area. And the further out you zoom, the more everything begins to look like one thing and the electrons and atoms on the smallest wave become indistinguishable from the larger universe. And again, it’s interesting that we observe a force in nature that…well, it doesn’t blend things, but it pushes them together. Just as space expands and pushes things apart at the largest level, at a local level we have gravity trying to hold things together. Rather than a series of digital dots, WP would have us view time something like a needle traveling over the surface of a record and being guided by the grooves in it. What’s super interesting is that PW and WP also seem to show division on one side and multiply on the other, K/T=AD. (Although if I didn’t already have that idea from Dramatica, would I have come to the same conclusion?)