Brown’s presentation in LAWS OF FORM, up to the chapter entitled “Equations of the Second Degree”, has to do with -- in the realms of Hamilton’s quaterions -- the spatial del operator. Only with equations of the second degree does he introduce linear-time; and with this introduction, he feels compelled to develop a modified notation. This notational variance was obviously unsatisfying. After the book was published, he apparently returned again and again to the issue. In a 1973 workshop held at Big Sur, he began to lay a foundation for operator-time: “Time is something you have to feed back into itself several times…there can’t be time without a self-referential equation…” He showed how is the value of such an equation, where what you have is what you don’t have and what you don’t have is what you have. This is a re-statement of the incompressible-compressible/rotational-irrotational reentry Maxwell stumbled over and tried to solve with his famous demon. This having/not-having/having-of-not-having (Jan Lukasiewicz’s 3-valued logic) is the essence of
90-degree twists onto/off-of imaginary-number axes effected by operator-time and most clearly seen in complex angular momentum cascade leading to tornado genesis. Such phase transition speaks to temporal ordering, not spatial ordering. Small time differentials, as dynamic factors of form in process, invoke new organizational regimes. What Spencer Brown began to talk about is higher orders of time in relation to the foundations of logic: time-logics.

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