This software illustrates a theory of time, history and the end of history as first described in the book The Invisible Landscape by Terence and Dennis McKenna. As related by Terence McKenna in his book True Hallucinations, the theory of Timewave Zero was revealed to him in the wake of an unusual psychedelic experiment conducted deep in the Amazon jungle in Colombia in 1971, which led to his being instructed in certain transformations of numbers, derived from the King Wen Sequence of I Ching hexagrams, relating to the occurrence of temporal phenomena. This led eventually to a mathematical description of "the timewave", which allegedly correlates time and history with the ebb and flow of something called Novelty, claimed to be a quality intrinsic to the temporal structure of the universe.

A peculiarity of this correlation is that at a certain point a singularity is reached which is the end of history — or at least a transition to a supra-historical order in which our ordinary conceptions of reality will be radically transformed. The date of this point was chosen by McKenna to be December 21, 2012, the date of the winter solstice of that year and also the end of the current era of 13 baktuns in the Maya Calendar (according to the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation 584,283).

A remarkable quality of the timewave is that it is a fractal (although this was not fully revealed until the late 1980s). Once a part of the wave is displayed the software allows you to expand any smaller part. This usually reveals a complexity of structure which persists however much the wave is magnified, a property typical of fractals. The idea that time has a fractal structure (in contrast to the Newtonian conception of time as pure, unstructured, duration) was first proposed by Terence McKenna. It is certainly an intriguing idea worthy of further consideration by physicists.

An interesting part of the theory of Timewave Zero is the notion of historical periods "in resonance" with each other, in which the events of the earlier period are in some sense repeated in the later. The software permits graphical display of different regions of the timewave that are in resonance with each other, and includes the ability to graph the so-called trigrammatic resonances in addition to the major resonances. This Fractal Time software thus permits a proper examination of Terence McKenna's claim to have discovered a property of time in terms of which historical phenomena can be explained and even predicted.