Black Holes and Time Visualization

There have been many side projects mentioned here in the past few weeks and I want to add this today to add to the updates on one of those projects.

Time is important when tracking, measuring, and planning.  So while trying to nail down an efficient way to display a timeline several visions have come to the foreground.  Probably the most common way to show a timeline is in a linear fashion like this:

I like the simplicity of this and like the simplicity of the clock.  I wonder if it would be possible to combine a timeline and a clock?  I believe so:  the most accurate visualization I have sketched up looks like 2 black hole gravity graphs with "now" being at the center between the two.  Time would be represented in 3d by a helix or when viewed from the side you'd see a sine wave.  

Here is a look from "NOW" looking either forward (future) or back (past):

A digital clock showing the same would look something like this:

2:0:1:4:10:03:15:23:15:19

It isn't much use to look at all this information at the same time.  Building on my prior post about increments of time though, this can be a useful tool or foundation where with the use of limits/filters a user could isolate useful views of time/timelines.

Why all the trouble to spend mental effort on something like this?  Pattern recognition, harmonics, and probably greatest of all... aesthetics.  So in addition to the time shown, data/links to events can be shown in a radial fashion like shown here:

You could always revert back to a standard timeline where time is shown in a linear fashion, and look at a clock separately...

Stay Thoughtful!  And have a great weekend!