Roger Penrose's "Fundamental Time" = Lou Kauffman's "Primordial Time" = Alain Connes "Primitive Time."

 

Sir Roger Penrose:

"In an open universe, there is, in effect, an imaginary time, which is i times the time scale, which is also a fundamental time."

 Math Professor Louis Kauffman corroborates Connes claim – what Connes calls 

“something more primitive than the passing of time” (Connes, 2021)

 and what Kauffman calls noncommutative primordial or primitive time: 

“In the notion of time there is an inherent clock and an inherent shift of phase that enables a synchrony, a precise dynamic beneath the apparent dynamic of the observed process” (Kauffman, 2018).

  Thus a primitive time makes an explicit appearance in the mathematics: time, that is, as an ordering without any of the quantitative features engendered by clocks.

book link

 A simplest and fundamental instance of these ideas is seen in the structure of i=−1−−−√. We view i as an iterant [5,6,7,8,9,10,11], a discrete elementary dynamical system repeating in time the values {⋯,−1,+1,−1,+1,⋯}. One can think of this system as resulting from the attempt to solve i2=−1 in the form i=−1/i. Then, one iterates the transformation x⟶−1/x and finds the oscillation from a starting value of +1 or −1. In this sense, i is identical in concept to a primordial time. Furthermore, the algebraic structure of the complex numbers emerges from two conjugate views of this discrete series as [−1,+1] and [+1,−1]. We introduce a temporal shift operator η such that η[−1,+1]=[+1,−1]η and η2=1 (sufficient to this purpose).

 https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/7/483/htm