Time Crystals and Pepperland

The plot of the Beatles’ iconic movie, Yellow Submarine, relies on a cosmology that has only just now (October 14, 2025) been found to be operational IRW.  Previously, the Beatles’ Pepperland could have been considered mere fantasy. Then along came Leo Joon Il Moon & team (Nature Physics) with their discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals.  

Remember the film? The Beatles are living lonely and unsatisfied lives in Liverpool. Like Eleanor Rigby, they are prepared to “lie alone in their grave(s).” They know nothing of an alternate reality known as Pepperland. 

Well actually, they know all about Pepperland… they just don’t know that they know (“a bit like you and me”). Ringo is being Ringo on a rainy Thursday morning when he finds himself pursued by something unexpected: a yellow submarine, captained by a newly commissioned, superannuated admiral, paradoxically known as Young Fred. 

Bottom line: There’s trouble in Pepperland and only the Beatles can help. But it’s a tall order. To reach their destination, the Fab Four, Young Fred, and an over-educated hitchhiker (JHB PhD) they pick up along the way, must cross their version of Ginnungagap (the ‘Gap’), a chaotic hole in the well-ordered fabric of the Old Norse cosmos. 

According to Snorri Sturluson of Iceland, compiler-author of the Prose Edda (c. 1220 CE), “It was at the beginning of time, when nothing was; sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap (Ginnungagap) was, but no growth… Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor…There was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man…” 

As in Genesis (“the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters” 1: 2), the Norse Creation Myth begins with chaos and ends with human beings (a humanoid in the Edda). But how do you portray primal chaos on a movie screen?  

The creators of Yellow Submarine came up with an ingenious solution: They distilled ‘the gap’ into a series of constituent branes (or ‘seas’) each constituting a virtual world of potential entities. The result is a succession of ‘seas’ (Seas of Time and Space, Monsters and Minds, et al.), ending in a sea of ‘negative being’, the Sea of Holes, and a monotone sea of pure potential, the Sea of Green. 

Taken together, these branes function as a series of ‘filters’ that, superimposed, yield an end product that captures the chaos of Genesis and the Edda. But the ‘chaotic uber-sea’ is not untethered: it begins at the Pier in Liverpool and ends on the monochrome plane at the entrance to Pepperland.

Now a series of events ends with the restoration of order in Pepperland and the conversion of the Blue Meanies, a race of hominoid miscreants terrorizing Paradise. But that is secondary!

The essential event in this segment is the Beatles’ recognition that they are and always have been co-located: ‘musical mops’ in Liverpool, a ‘trim and tidy’ bandmates in Pepperland. 

In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust describes his own realization of co-location. For Proust, it was the tactile feel of cobblestones that stimulated awareness. For the Beatles, it is music. Turns out, music is the universal language: it means the same thing in Liverpool, Pepperland, and everywhere in between.

Cute story but just a story, right? So wrong! You might have gotten away with such fuzzy thinking back in 2024…but not in 2025! Not now that we know what we know about Rondeau Time Crystals.

To understand what’s happening we first need to understand ‘ordinary’ Time Crystals. Here patterns repeat across time, forming a regular, repeating cycle that returns ‘home’, i.e. to its original position, over and over again, without any input of energy or any output of heat (entropy). Time as we know it is effectively frozen. Yes, Jim Croce, you can put time in a bottle!

Fascinating as this idea is, its applications are limited. The cyclical progression in an ordinary time crystal is completely deterministic. Therefore, it is a poor model for most real world phenomena – i.e. any phenomena that include a random or an intentional (free will) element.

Rondeau to the rescue! Time crystals of this newly discovered type include an element of indetermination, i.e. chaos, in their constitution. As in Norse Mythology, there is a chaotic ‘gap’ separating two ordered bookends (call them Alpha and Omega, Muspell and Niflheim, or Liverpool and Pepperland).

The strange, fecund, and highly entertaining seas separating Alpha and Omega have been specially chosen to culminate in negation and chaos, void (Sea of Holes) and monotony (Sea of Green).   

However, each sea has its own logos, its own unique rules of order, and those logoi build on each other. Within each brane, there is the capacity to encode information (order). But in the end, these branes are like the sets and scenes in Shakespeare’s Tempest: 

“…Our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” 

Welcome to “Nowhere Land” and the featureless Sea of Green. Why choose green for the monotone? Perhaps because it is the color of spring, of new life, of the slime from which we all sprang. It symbolizes Aristotle’s pure potentia.    

And what of the sub itself? It is the insubstantial (ever mobile) medium linking  the potentially ordered states of Liverpool and Pepperland across the chaotic Gap. It is the ‘bridge over troubled waters’ (chaos), the virtual link between Ringo’s Pier and Khan’s Pleasure-dome. It is the Milky Way linking Earth to the stars; it is Kermit’s rainbow and Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road. In Judeo-Christian terms, it is Torah, Covenant, Eucharist, and Church. Fundamentally, it is the superposition of what was, what is, and what is to come. It is eternal Presence, per se.  

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Van Gogh’s Die Zugbrücke depicts a quiet rural drawbridge near Arles, where bright sunlight, clear skies, and strong, rhythmic brushstrokes create a vivid sense of movement and everyday life. The painting emphasizes the connection between people and their landscape, turning an ordinary bridge into a scene of harmony, color, and human activity.