Interesting Crackpots Vol. 4: Gene Ray, Father of Time Cube

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McGeddon, via Wikipedia Commons

When the sun is directly overhead, it’s mid-day where you are, but roughly six hours west of you, it’s sunset. The same distance east of your position, it’s sunrise. The number of hours varies by season but otherwise, this principle is true wherever on Earth you go.

However because our solar system has but a single sun, there’s only ever a single sunrise, sunset, mid-day, and midnight happening on Earth at any one time, regardless of where you’re standing. If you’ve understood all of this so far, congratulations, you’re smarter than Gene Ray.

The Inventor of Cubic Time

Gene Ray, born in 1927 and deceased at age 87 in 2015, was an electrician by trade as well as a hobbyist inventor. That is, right up until August of 1997 when he suffered the same sort of life-changing, rapid onset madness that struck all the other guys so far featured in this series of articles.

You see, Gene Ray realized everything I told you in the first paragraph, but not the second. He grasped that equidistant sunrise, sunset, mid-day, and midnight “zones” move around Earth relative to the sun (or rather, Earth moves relative to those zones, and the sun) but not that there are innumerable times of day in between sunrise and sunset that you might also attach significance to.

Nor that each quarter-rotation of the “time cube” does not somehow multiply the number of sunrises, sunsets, mid-days, or midnights relative to each quadrant, so each person on Earth in fact experiences only a single instance of each time of day per planetary rotation.

Those four times of day as experienced from four positions around the Earth, Gene conceived as an invisible cube that rotates independently of the Earth, its orientation locked to the sun for obvious reasons. So it is that the Earth rotates inside of that conceptual cube, which itself fully rotates once per year.

This meant in Gene’s mind that for every single rotation of the Earth, four days pass. He reasoned this is because as the Earth rotates within the Time Cube, from any of four quarter-rotational positions, a full day is expressed: Sunrise, to the east of the mid-day corner, sunset to the west of that corner, and midnight opposite the mid-day corner. Hence, one day per 90 degrees quarter-turn, and four days per full rotation.


Author’s own illustration

You and I can see what’s wrong with this reasoning because presumably, neither of us is schizophrenic. First of all, those four points don’t exist except as reference points in Gene Ray’s imagination. They aren’t objective, carved into the foundation of the universe, and do not even correspond to any fixed locations on the Earth.

It would be just as valid to define four additional halfway points between sunrise and mid-day, mid-day and sunset, sunset and midnight, and midnight to sunrise, giving you an extruded octagonal solid rather than a cube. Or sixteen sides, if you double the number of halfway points again.

The second issue is that Gene conceived of a “day” as a moving patch of illumination seen from a perspective outside the Earth (or which Earth moves relative to), measuring it from the point where the sunrise is happening in the east to the point where the sunset is happening in the west (relative to whichever part of Earth is directly facing the sun and thus experiencing mid-day).

If he were to envision that illuminated half of the Earth with the planet in smooth rather than incremental rotational motion he’d soon realize there aren’t any objective quarter-turn “snap points” in Earth’s rotation.

There are four quarter-turn positions of rotational symmetry in Gene’s imaginary cube, but the Earth itself isn’t objectively divided into quadrants. You might say the sun divides it into the sunrise, mid-day, sunset, and midnight quadrants, but these are projected onto Earth by the sun rather than being inherent to the planet itself.

You might elaborate on Gene’s reasoning to say that therefore 360 days occur per rotation of the Earth, one per degree, but that system of measuring rotational increments is also something humans invented. You’d have to allow for infinite days per rotation as measured from any one of an infinity of arbitrarily small rotational increments. Understanding and integrating that knowledge would yield more of a “time sphere” model you see, and Gene was really into cubes.


A2569875 via Wikipedia Commons

Besides that, Gene’s reasoning engine ran out of steam well before he could’ve identified any of these issues. A common symptom of Dunning Krugeritis is mistaking the limits of one’s own understanding for the limits of what is possible for anybody to understand.

Whatever I don’t understand must be magic

This same type of mindset often mistakes whatever extent of a problem it’s able to grasp for the full extent of that problem as if however much you can work out on your own must be all there is to know. Like shining a flashlight into the darkness and imagining the circular patch it illuminates is the only thing that was out there, waiting to be revealed.

Perhaps you’ve also noticed how easy it is to pass off intentionally confusing nonsense as profundities to a certain crowd because that’s also how legitimately advanced topics sound to them. The human brain evolved to conserve calories under starvation conditions and as such is riddled with labor-saving cognitive shortcuts.

These shortcuts stop you from lying awake at night, wasting energy by endlessly contemplating questions there aren’t answers for, like “where did the universe come from?” At the point where the brain exhausts itself, it throws up its little hands and concludes “must’ve been magic” or something similar. Presto, you’re freed from the thought-loop! You get your dopamine surge, feel an illusory but gratifying sense of closure, and can sleep finally.

But the same mechanisms kick in even for questions science does have answers to if it happens that you personally either never learned those answers, reject them for political/religious reasons, or cannot understand them. Alas, humans tend to trust their own convictions or conclusions they arrived at by their own reasoning, over information handed to them by strangers.

So it is that about a third of Americans consider “why are there still monkeys?” to be a glaring plot hole in Darwin’s theory. A mercifully smaller percentage believe the absence of stars in photos taken on the surface of the Moon by Apollo astronauts to be a dopey editing oversight by NASA conspirators, rather than an easily reproducible result of how photographs turn out when there are very bright objects close to the camera, and much dimmer, distant light sources in the background.

Likewise with “If global warming is real, why is it snowing outside?” or “why is the Moon’s shadow smaller in diameter than the Moon itself, if the sun is so distant?” or “why don’t planes have to constantly adjust their course downward if Earth is spherical?” In each case, the hole is not in biology, physics, or whatever else, but in the lay understanding of it. Good luck persuading this genre of humans that their knowledge is incomplete though.

Gene had the good fortune to live and die before we had covid to cull people like this. As such he enjoyed a long and illustrious online career promulgating his belief that the Earth experiences four days for every single rotation, including at one point being invited to lecture about it at Georgia Tech in 2005.

Perhaps a dubious honor for a man who described college professors as “evil oneness educated stupid” who children would be blessed for killing. He couldn’t turn down the appearance of mainstream academic validation, however, nor a chance to introduce young minds to his revolutionary worldview.

Gene regarded Time Cube as revolutionary because if true it would constitute proof of a geometric structure to spacetime. A mechanism, invisible to human senses, whereby the interaction of the sun and the Earth as one rotates about the other produces our experience of sunset following sunrise, something easily explicable as a consequence of sunlight illuminating different regions of the Earth as it spins.

Nothing so mundane would satisfy Gene. His mind was the same sort which looks with astonishment upon fir trees, thinking “Christmas trees? What are they doing out here in nature? Humans invented Christmas. Someone must’ve invented nature too…”

Or that bearded older fellow on Duck Dynasty who pointed out smugly that we enumerate years starting from the date of Jesus’ crucifixion. As if the Chinese calendar doesn’t exist. As if the universe knows what a “calendar” is. Or a “year”, for that matter.

Reality is a slippery customer. It gives us very few footholds from which to begin understanding it. So the appeal of finding what seems to be “grid lines” in spacetime itself is immeasurable. It has driven far brighter men to madness than Gene Ray.

The Kepler Connection

I would compare him generously to Johannes Kepler, an otherwise brilliant astronomer who wasted his autumn years pursuing a cosmology wherein the Earth sits at the center of an invisible series of nested platonic solids. Superficially not so different from Time Cube except more elaborate, and intended to explain the apparent motion of heavenly bodies.


Ludwig Günthe via Wikipedia Commons

He could never quite make it work, but he also couldn’t let go of it. Like a moth trapped until its dying gasps around a candle, believing it has at last reached the sun, Kepler remained under his own spell until his death in 1630. You might consider him prototypical of the other men featured in this series.

The nested solids model was so inescapably compelling to Kepler because if true, it would constitute a brief glimpse at some sort of cosmic machinery. A tantalizing glimmer of the normally hidden superstructure of the solar system, proof at last that we live within the handiwork of a celestial engineer.

The modern-day, low IQ version of this mental trap is flat-Earth cosmology, a model not even taken seriously back when Kepler lived. If Earth was a flat disc covered by a solid dome as scripture describes, it could not have naturally formed that way. It would unambiguously be an engineered habitat for humans and other creatures to live within. In other words, proof positive of a creator.

Someone who has pinned all of their hopes on the Bible’s promise that death isn’t the end would understandably be on the lookout, ever-anxious, for even the smallest shred of evidence confirming what they desperately wish for. To finally shut up those pesky skeptics, but also the nagging voice of their own doubts.

This furnishes us with an explanation for Kepler’s helpless downward spiral of misguided fascination. Likewise with the modern-day revival of ancient Hebrew cosmology as the ultimate extreme in science denial. Gene Ray seems to have been similarly awestruck by what seemed to him like a glimpse of hidden order in the universe, but he differed from Kepler in that Gene Ray wasn’t a Christian.

Gene’s main objection to the Bible seemed to be that it contradicted his own ideas about cubic time and features a single (if trinitarian) deity. Many sections of the now-defunct Time Cube website highlighted contradictions between the Biblical conception of time, and the teachings of Gene Ray, self-described “wisest human”.

The Time Cube website went viral in the mid-2000s and is how most people who already knew of Gene before this article came to learn of his ideas. Ray had a logorrheic writing style common to schizophrenics that possessed the same sort of comedic charm as mangled English on bootleg Japanese t-shirts. An excerpt from this archived copy of the site can be seen below:

In 1884, meridian time personnel met
in Washington to change Earth time.
First words said was that only 1 day
could be used on Earth to not change
the 1 day Bible. So they applied the 1
day and ignored the other 3 days.
The Bible time was wrong then and it
proved wrong today. This a major lie
has so much evil feed from it’s wrong.
No man on Earth has no belly-button,
it proves every believer on Earth a liar.
Children will be blessed for
Kissing Of Educated Adults
Who Ignore 4 Simultaneous
Days Same Earth Rotation.
Practicing evil ONEness -
Upon Earth Of Quadrants.

Perhaps for algorithm/censorship reasons, in the archived copy, the word Bible is replaced with marshmallow, and the word evil is replaced with boring. I’ve corrected it in the excerpt to more accurately reflect the original. Besides his conviction that we all experience four days per rotation of the Earth, Gene was emphatic that we live in a “universe of opposites”.

By this, he really means opposing extremes, with most of what we experience day to day falling somewhere in between. Good and evil, light and dark, hot and cold, etc. This means only that there exist theoretical minimums and maximums for any conceivable phenomenon.

The biggest planet, the smallest planet. The tallest building, shortest building. Speed of light, versus absolute zero. It was to Gene Ray, and in fact Alfred Lawson as well, a monumental epiphany that all things can be defined by qualities each of which occupies some point along a spectrum between two extremes.

Although really the minimum extreme for most, if not all of these examples would be nonexistence, there I go again trying to make sense of a madman’s mental diarrhea. Which I’ll happily reproduce more of below!

Every Man Born Of Woman.
Belly-Button Is the Signature
Of Your Personal Creator -
I Believe Her Name Mama.
Pastor Told His Flock That
God Created All Of Them -
Truth Was That They All had
Mama Made Belly Buttons,
Church Was Full Of Liars.
Earth Has 4 Days In Same 24 Hrs., 1 Day God Was Wrong.
Einstein Was ONEist Brain.
Try My Belly-Button Logic.
No God Knows About 4 Days, It Is evil To Ignore 4 Days,
Does Your Teacher Know ?
Fraudulent ONEness of religious
academia has retarded your opposite
rationale brain to a half brain slave.
YOU IGNORE 3 OF 4 DAYS -
FORCE 4 DAYS ON EARTH,
THEY ALREADY EXIST.
4 HORSEMEN HAVE 4 DAYS
IN ONLY 1 EARTH ROTATION.
4 ANGLES STOOD ON 4 CORNERS.
4 CORNERS ROTATE TO 16 CORNERS
WHICH EQUAL TO 4 CORNER DAYS.
TEACHERS ARE EVIL LIARS — THE
ONEness OF GOD IS STILLness DEATH.

His conviction that the universe could only be understood as a collection of opposing extremes is the reason for his derision of “one-ist” thinking. Which in turn understandably translates into a disdain for monotheism, making Gene one of the very few schizophrenics I’ve ever seen who didn’t go all-in on Christianity, Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, or some other flavor of Abrahamic religion. Shame, he would’ve loved gematria.

This also somewhat makes sense of his anti-semitism, though not his apparent homophobia or racism. Gene did have some spicy views on race, identifying Indians with sunrise, Caucasians with mid-day, Asians with sunset, and Africans with midnight. Off-color but not, in itself, hateful.

I imagine a case could be made that the slurs found throughout his writings are used colloquially and not in a context where they’re clearly intended to be hurtful to actual gay people or PoC. Rather, simply being general use pejoratives familiar to children socialized to society’s standards during Gene’s own youth.

That’s a fine line to walk, however, as I’ll get into when I cover Terry Davis, another schizophrenic who was fond of peppering his word salad with slurs. It's remarkable Gene was still able to lecture at Georgia Tech and equally remarkable that until then he could think of no reason why academia didn’t take him seriously except that they were evil.

On his website, he once offered the sum of $10,000 USD to Wikipedia or any other challenger able to prove to his satisfaction that Time Cube was false. Keywords being “to his satisfaction”. Of course, nobody was ever able to claim the prize. One wonders what it would even accomplish to change his mind. Even if you could convince him he was mistaken, “wisest human” and “above god” are difficult claims to walk back. People have doubled down over less.

You’d think since he ticks all the same boxes as Alfred Lawson, Wilhelm Reich, and Hanns Horbiger, that Gene would go on to be one of the greats. Lawsonia religion, Orgonomy, and World Ice Theory all had thousands of followers at their peaks. You’d be wrong though, Time Cube had but one serious devotee apart from Gene himself.

The Tragedy of Gene’s First and Final Apostle

Richard Janczarski founded Cubic Awareness Online in an apparent effort to take Gene Ray’s ideas and render them coherent for a mass audience. It receives its final updates in 2007 and is now defunct, but archived for posterity here. The most recent update furnishes some clues as to what became of Janczarski:

15 Aug 2007: After having consulted with Dr Gene Ray, I have added to CubicAO a new disclaimer, reprinted herewith. DISCLAIMER: This CubicAO website doesn’t claim to offer any “Cubic Prophecies”. This CubicAO site is a secondary, unofficial site that is subordinate to TimeCube.com. This CubicAO site is not intended to be glorified above TimeCube.com. Scientists don’t know what gravity is, they don’t know what physics is. We must attack the scientists, Academia and religion, or face cannibalism like Easter Island. CubicAO is not intended to be more powerful than Dr Gene Ray’s Time Cube site, and indeed CubicAO is separate from Dr Gene Ray’s Time Cube site. This CubicAO site is not intended to contain excessive amounts of artwork.

Gene Ray would ultimately turn against his only follower, perhaps out of jealousy. There can’t be two wisest humans, after all. The criticisms started as a trickle, then grew into a torrent, I would speculate as Gene Ray’s jealousy increased. Seeing his own garbled thoughts un-garbled into something intelligible put the lie to Gene’s conviction that nobody on Earth was more intelligent.

Because Janczarski had performed this process of clarification on Gene’s own ideas, he couldn’t find fault with the substance of Cubic Awareness Online itself, so he took issue with the fact that his teachings were being delivered on what, for the mid-2000s, was a competently designed website.

Comparing Cubic Awareness Online to the best Gene was able to personally manage in the way of web design, and seeing Janczarski communicate Time Cube more eloquently (and coherently) than Gene himself could manage, amounted to an unintentional yet fatal refutation of Gene’s over the top self-regard.

The bottom line is that no man who characterized himself as “above God” could tolerate followers who dared outshine him. So Gene rebuked Richard, rejected Cubic Awareness Online as ostentatious heresy that could only dilute the purity of his message, and in doing so broke Janczarski’s heart.

Richard Janczarski so deeply admired Gene Ray that being rejected by him proved a fatal blow to his mental health. Richard had until this point obsessively documented his trips to interview Gene Ray on his Youtube channel, which is still up thank goodness. His devotion to Time Cube wasn’t performative or ironic. He revered Gene Ray as piously as Gene revered himself.

The ideal follower. No cult founder could ask for more. Gene wasn’t interested in starting a cult though. He had no intention of sharing the glory with anybody. His job was to proclaim the timeless holy truth of Time Cube to a stupid, evil world. Our job was to receive it, thank him, and use it to correct our own false, wicked 1-corner misapprehensions.

Richard was to be Gene’s right-hand man through this golden age of the Time Cube revolution. But there weren’t any openings in Gene Ray’s regime for lieutenants. Even Yahweh purportedly delegates to angels, but Gene insisted on standing alone. So, a dejected Janczarski committed suicide in 2008.





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Great piece, Alex

I thoroughly enjoyed the read

I do remember stumbling upon this site some time in the early 2000s. Then more recently discovering the tragic story of his scorned acolyte. The sheer volume of energy these men wasted on their fruitless pursuit brings to mind one of Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts:"

If you ever go temporarily insane, don’t shoot somebody, like a lot of people do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you’d really be surprised

Even standing back and appreciating how cooked these two were, I feel sorry for the betrayal that Janczarski experienced

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