The Kumulipo Had Three Temporal Scales Centuries before Fairbanks

On 21 April 2025, a proposal out of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks gave time three dimensions instead of one. Gunther Kletetschka pitches his temporal axes at three scales, the Planck floor at one end and cosmological evolution at the other, with interaction-scale processes between. From the eigenvalues of the temporal metric he derives three particle generations and their mass ratios of 1 to 4.5 to 21.0. He then predicts a neutrino mass of 0.058 eV, plus resonances at 2.3 TeV and 4.1 TeV.

Eight years earlier, Hūfanga ʻŌkusitino Māhina had set out a tā-vā (time-space) theory of reality with a rival count. Tā and vā make up the common medium of everything ontologically. Their indivisibility gives reality four dimensions rather than six. Beneath the abstract pair lies a concrete one, fuo (form) and uho (content). Tēvita O. Kaʻili and Nuhisifa Seve-Williams applied the tenets in doctoral studies in anthropology and education.

Three temporal scales also organize the Hawaiian koʻihonua (genealogical chant) called the Kumulipo. There, Rubellite Johnson treats wā as a quantity measured by celestial cycles, movements in space. Wākea holds the peak solar cycle. His two brothers hold the rest, Lehuaʻula the stellar cycle of Antares and Mākulukulu the planetary cycle of Saturn. Across 16 wā or cantos, the chant makes time its central theme, as George Kanahele argued. Daily ʻaha at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu in 2019 happened three times, keyed to sunrise and sunset with the noon zenith between.

In the two accounts alike, matter and time trade places. Kletetschka proposes matter as a property of time rather than a thing existing in time. The name Wākea reports an identical reversal. Inside wā lies a period of time as well as a space or interval. Ākea means broad and unobstructed. The name therefore translates as time occupying space. In Aotearoa, Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal cites a cosmogonic genealogy from Māori Marsden listing wā for time and ātea for space, joined in the term wātea. From those two, Ranginui and Papatūānuku emerge as sky and earth.

At a minus sign, the two accounts part company. Kletetschka gives the three temporal terms of his metric a plus and the three spatial terms a minus. Once two temporal dimensions become negligible, General Relativity returns as a limiting case. Māhina refuses that arithmetic. One tenet of his holds tā and vā inseparable in mind as in reality, on one level of spatiotemporality, with no signature available for prising them apart. In the Moana account, time cannot be switched off in twos to recover a tamer physics.

Under scrutiny, the split looks instrumental rather than metaphysical. Written to be computed, a metric needs opposed signs. Those signs are what let a six-dimensional object collapse into Minkowski spacetime. The Moana instruments were the body and the horizon instead. Among the time definers of space, Māhina lists tāpopao (canoe-building) and vaaʻihaka (dance movements). Nobody dancing a haka can subtract the beat from the interval it opens. Moana voyagers arrived some 3,500 to 4,000 years ago with the vocabulary of tā and vā already at hand.

Beneath the two counts lies a third term with no slot in the physics. Pukui and Elbert give wā as a period of time or a season, and also as a space or interval between objects. A third gloss makes it a roar or a din. Around the fall equinox comes ʻIkuwā, the lunar month named for the roar of surf and thunder. Nuʻuhiwa glosses the chant I Kuwā as existing in time and space through sound. Sound is the phenomenon in which duration and extension refuse to be pulled apart, since a wavelength is a period wearing spatial clothes.

In the two accounts, orientation matters physically and in opposite directions. Kletetschka draws his three temporal axes as a left-handed system, with that handedness producing parity violation in weak interactions. In his diagram, handedness descends from an origin of time, one arrow out of one vertex. Kameʻeleihiwa puts the past in front as ka wā mamua and the future behind as ka wā mahope. The Hawaiian in her description faces the past, backed towards the future, hunting historical answers to present dilemmas. In conversation with Māhina, Hauʻofa spiralled the geometry further into ecological time.

Past the three languages of the two accounts, the vocabulary widens. Māhina roots vaha (seascape) and vahaʻa (the vā between things) in vā itself, giving vahaʻa motu for the vā between islands and vahaʻa matapā for the vā of a door frame. Fijian keeps the cognate as wasa or wasawasa, the ocean, alongside gauna for time. In Suva, therefore, two words split what Tongan holds in one. Kletetschka needs six coordinates. Fijian needs two nouns.

On the arithmetic, the divergence gets a harder edge. Hawaiian counting had a mixed base, decimal in part and quaternary in part. Kāuna named a unit of four. Above it the terms climbed in tens, from kaʻau at 40 up to lehu at 400,000. Alexander gave the reason, since fish or coconuts got counted a couple to a hand, or tied into bundles of four. Missionaries later supplied haneli for 100 and kaukani for 1,000, the powers of ten with no Hawaiian word of their own.

Further east, in what is today French Polynesia, Mangareva went the other way. Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller found three binary steps superposed on a decimal structure, drawing on an account of the counting words set down in 1938. Takau marked 10 and paua 20, with tataua at 40 and varu at 80. The trade it supported died out in the mid-1400s, centuries in front of the binary arithmetic published by Leibniz in 1703. A tiny island population had built a calculating tool, one cutting the addition facts anyone needed to memorise.

Neither count came from India. Sanskrit entered island Southeast Asia through the Indianisation of its polities, dated from 290 BCE to the 15th century CE. Old Javanese absorbed the deepest deposit. The dictionary compiled by Zoetmulder in 1982 holds no fewer than 25,500 entries, with almost half of them Sanskrit loans. Malay took juta for a million out of Sanskrit ayuta, meaning ten thousand. Keti came out of koṭi, ten million. Kāla, the Sanskrit for time, arrived in Malay barely altered. East of Sulawesi the numeral loans thin out and stop.

India did arrive in the Moana, by contract rather than by diffusion. On 14 May 1879 the Leonidas disembarked at Levuka out of Calcutta. Over the following 37 years, 42 ships made 87 voyages, with 60,965 passengers leaving India and 60,553 arriving in Fiji. Their descendants speak Fiji Hindi, an official tongue of the republic under the 2013 Constitution. Samay and kāl therefore share a city with gauna. The Indic sense of kāla got to the Pacific by indenture ship, some 1,900 years after Sanskrit got to Java.

One arithmetic does join the two accounts. Decimal place value with a zero is a South Asian invention, given its rules by Brahmagupta in 628 CE. The top quark figure of 173.21 GeV gets written in that notation. The 16 wā of the Kumulipo get counted in it too. Anyone commissioning a Moana edition of a research consent form or an observatory consultation document inherits the whole tangle. The trap is glossing wā as time, since the gloss drops the interval and the roar with it.