Plato, Socrates & Time Crystals

In the 4^th century BCE, Plato, Athens’ leading philosopher, wrote a series of dialogs allegedly based on his first and second hand encounters with Socrates 25+ years earlier. (Gospels : Jesus :: Dialogs : Socrates?)

Perhaps the most famous of those dialogs is known as the Phaedo: it recounts the last hours of Socrates’ life, spent in conversation with his devoted disciples. The climax of the Phaedo is a debate between Socrates and Simmias on the nature of the soul.

According to Plato, Socrates gets the better of his interlocutor (as always), but most philosophers feel that neither argument is totally persuasive. But now we know the answer! 

Simmias introduces the topic by proposing a popular model: soul : body :: attunement : lyre. A lyre, of course, is a musical instrument made of wood and wire, the so-called strings. Merely as such, the lyre has no significant use or value (except perhaps as an antique); but when the strings are ‘tuned’ in a particular way, the instrument ‘springs to life’ and suddenly acquires the potential to produce music (Beauty & Truth) that may be of great import.

Simmias suggests that the soul is similarly an ‘attunement’ but this time of the ‘blood and bones’ that constitute a body. When the components of our body are properly ‘tuned’, we say that the body has life; that ‘attunement’ is what we mean by soul. 

Now this model is instinctively appealing, but it has a major drawback: once the lyre falls into disrepair, it is no longer tuned to produce great music. According to this analogy, the soul survives only as long as the parts of the body remain properly aligned. Death is misalignment.  

This means that the soul is mortal and co-terminal with the body. This is something that Socrates, on the day of his impending execution, can understandably not accept. So he proceeds to develop a model that supports his preferred conclusion (immortality). 

Sartre would doubtless accuse Socrates of bad faith; but we should be more charitable…until we’ve spent our own time on desolation row. (Dylan)  

Socrates begins his attempted refutation of Simmias from the premise that the soul must be immortal because the contrary would imply that “the soul, though more divine and lovelier than the body, may still perish before it, being a kind of attunement.” Indeed, a lyre is likely to go out of tune before the instrument itself is physically destroyed.

He also considered the status of ‘virtue’ under the attunement model. Are we to equate ‘the Good’ with a ‘finer attunement’ of the strings? All life is attunement; is what we call ‘evil’ nothing but a relative loss of tonal quality? 

“Do you believe in life after death?” That’s how we muggles artlessly introduce the subject of the soul. Prior to 2025 CE, we had no better answer to this question than those offered by Simmias and Socrates. But now we do!

On October 14, 2025, Leo Joon Il Moon, et al. published a paper in Nature Physics detailing the discovery of a new phase of matter they’re calling Rondeau Time Crystals (RTC).

You’re familiar with crystals. The rock on your finger is one. So is the hunk of quartz that’s holding down papers on your desk. And, of course, so is each flake of snow that is falling just now outside your window. We are surrounded by crystals, space crystals that is, and our lives are better for them. 

A space crystal is a pattern of molecules that endlessly repeats in an appropriate medium. Imagine if we could create a time crystal, a pattern of events that endlessly repeats?

Wait! I saw that movie, Groundhog Day. A beauty! And two dozen years later, Eureka! We found it – the first time crystal. Who says science doesn’t imitate art? Didn’t the Quantum Mechanics imitate the Cubists? 

But for all the hoopla, the discovery of time crystals wasn’t the breakthrough we’d hoped for. Process within a time crystal, i.e. the cycle of events, is 100% determined. Therefore, the time crystal was useless as a model for processes that include an element of indetermination, i.e. randomization…or agency (free will). 

Until now! Discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals changes everything. The cycle of events in an RTC has three phases. The Alpha and the Omega phases are fully determined, as above. However, they are separated by a third phase, I’m calling it Delta, that is entirely indeterminate, i.e. chaotic.

Indetermination and determination are not incompatible after all. Free will does not preclude causality. Kaos does not undermine Logos: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

Rather, order propagates non-locally…and stochastically. Just as quanta remain entangled over vast stretches of (relatively) ‘empty’ spacetime, so the ordered phases of an RTC exhibit entanglement across a chaotic gap. 

But it gets even better! First, the Omega state, though co-determined with the Alpha state, can be slightly skewed with respect to Alpha. Think of the inversion of an image along a Mobius Strip or of the aperiodic tiling of a surface: difference need not entail disorder.

Second, the so-called Delta state, while incurably chaotic, can be ‘fine-tuned’ (there’s that phrase again) in a way that permits local islands of order to emerge epiphenomenally without compromising Delta’s globally chaotic state. 

Think of the hammock in your backyard. Strung between two trees, it assumes a catenary shape; that is its topology. It lets you nap in it. But that shape is not a function of the trees or of the hammock; it is a function of the entire structure of things. Likewise, RTCs.

Think Shakespeare’s Tempest: “…the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself…shall dissolve, and…leave not a rack behind.” 

“Leave not a rack behind” – so Simmias was right after all. The soul is an attunement of the body and it vanishes like scenery once the set is struck.

Not so fast! An ephemeral pattern arising in the Delta phase may evoke a sympathetic response in the pluripotent and eternal Omega phase. In this way, freely formed but transient patterns in Delta may be eternalized in Omega. But there is a catch…ultimately, a happy catch.

God is eternal presence. Because any pattern in Omega is eternal, it must be compatible with God’s essential nature, i.e. the Good. Therefore, patterns arising in Delta only elicit an echo in Omega if and to the extent that they are ‘good’ as Good is manifest in Delta, i.e. as beauty, truth or justice. 

This disposes of Socrates’ second argument, i.e. that evil must be more, or less, than ‘poor tuning’. In fact, whatever is less than ‘good’ in Delta will find no resonance whatsoever in Omega; it will die in Delta.  

And where does this leave you? Your sense of self, your identity, your consciousness? British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead constructed a much more elaborate scheme and concluded that there was no place for personal identity in God’s Consequent (Omega) Nature.

Whitehead was wrong! To whatever extent a pattern in Delta is reproduced in Omega, all aspects of that pattern will be conserved. If a pattern in Delta includes consciousness, there is no reason to suppose that it will lack consciousness in Omega. To argue otherwise would be to claim that consciousness per se is evil and incompatible with God’s essential nature.  

So where does this leave us? Both Simmias and Socrates are wrong…and right! The soul (life itself) is an attunement and it does perish with the body. However, to the extent that the patterns generated in Delta are ‘good’, those patterns are eternally resurrected in Omega. 

This is the eschaton, the so-called ‘last things’: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Death is the loss of attunement; Judgement identifies those patterns in Delta that are consistent with God’s essential nature. Those patterns enjoy ‘eternal life’ in Omega, i.e. Heaven; any other patterns evaporate in Delta without a trace. That’s Hell.

***

Paulina Peavy’s I Am Alpha and Omega (c. 1937–1970s) blends mystical symbolism with visionary abstraction, presenting the cosmos as a living, spiritual continuum. The painting reflects Peavy’s belief in cyclical time and divine evolution, using layered forms and luminous color to evoke the eternal “beginning and end.” Through its fusion of text, sacred geometry, and celestial imagery, the work portrays Alpha and Omega as both a cosmic force and a guiding spiritual presence.