"books themselves are aperiodic crystals"

[Ripheus23]

That's from Douglas Hofstadter, I read it in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. There's a discussion of life as aperiodically crystalline involved in this. So, I've been told by several posters here that Shards are not crystals and that crystallography is not directly relevant to Realmatics as such, but I am fairly sure there's a chance that this is not so except in the superficial sense that Shards are not what we usually think of as gems/jewels/crystals.

Anyway, let's suppose a Spiritweb is a time crystal in a higher dimension of time. That is, there is mortality where we experience a limited number of moments present by present; there is sempiternity where moments are perceived, but immortally; and then there is eternity, where all the moments are perceived at once, in the form of time-lines. This perception (per Flatland's illustration of dimensional perception) involves a higher dimension of time. But geometrically, there's nothing disallowing a higher dimension of time than that, where not just several time-points but several time-lines are perceived at once, as time-shapes. The Realm where time-shapes are perceived is the Spiritual Realm* (the Cognitive Realm is read off time-lines, where a line is like a proposition, which corresponds to a sentence, which is a string of words). But these shapes do not move (or if they do, it is not in a lower dimension of time as such, so their "motion" or change would be quasi-alien in quality). Their lines are locked in place. They look like graphs, or webs, or crystals. Maybe even books, after a fashion (sets of strings of "words"**). Shards, then (this plays into my guess that Adonalsium's personal magic system was based on books).

*[You might think the disavowal of temporality in the Spiritual Realm, or the conflation of all times into one, or their irrelevance as such, as attested to by many WoBs, would have it not be true that the Spiritual Realm is a higher dimension of time. But indeed the conflation description proves the point, instead, and makes note of the sense in which "there is no time" in the Spiritual Realm: there is no passage of time, as such (though even this is not necessarily absolutely true, else how do Spiritwebs change during Hemalurgy or Splintering or whatever---is change not an intrinsically temporal concept?).]

**[One might think "the Perceptual Realm" is a better name for the Physical Realm. Since the Spiritual Realm is not the Beyond, and since the Beyond would be transcendent, the Spiritual Realm is not transcendent per se nota. But what differentiates it from the Cognitive Realm, then? There is, though, a system of philosophy that describes such a layering of information, Kant's. For Kant, the three levels of units of information were percepts, concepts, and ideas. Perceptions, cognitions, and ideations. These can even be made to correspond to the three universal sentential types, i.e. imperative, declarative, and interrogative (prescriptions, assertions, and questions), in that the meaning of an individual word is a command to think about that to which the word refers (a percept), a concept relates manifold percepts (declarations/assertions of concepts), and an ideal is a "focus imaginarius" that unifies the assertions (a guiding question).]

Edited October 15, 2018 by Ripheus23

[Feruchemist he/him]

Hmm, has long-range order been given definition in the Cosmere?