knitting

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Knitting is Kastner's image for spacetime coming into being through actualized transactions: yarn figures real possibilities, the stitch being made figures the present act of actualization, and retained fabric figures the settled record. AB uses it to repair the disappearing wake image. It implies neither a cosmic knitter nor simultaneous rows of becoming or a preferred reference frame.

Explanation

AB places knitting beside its sea, crest and wake: water cannot adequately picture a past that is kept, whereas fabric retains its stitches. The garment is spacetime itself in the attributed ontology, not something moving through a pre-existing temporal container. AB explicitly removes the crafter, and its narrative note warns that the image can nevertheless tempt a God's-eye view. That note also records the shift from a row on the needles to the single stitch being made.

RB1 spells out why the shift matters: a specific transaction creates each stitch, not an entire plane of simultaneity. It distinguishes the strict present as actualization interface from an analogically eternally present quantum substratum. Unused yarn does not mean that incompatible outcomes remain actualizable for the already settled event; further potentia arise in a changed situation. The accompanying iceberg image answers a different question, emphasizing the ontological scope of unactualized possibility rather than the knitting image's temporal genesis.

Scope and attribution

Direct knitting ownership belongs to AB and RB1. Related fabric and actualization language in RB2 does not by itself establish this craft image there; no knitting match was found in PB or RB3. The account is attributed to Kastner as presented by the manuscripts, not established independently as physics.

AB — The Actual Book

Knitting repairs the wake's inability to retain the past: fabric keeps each actualized stitch. AB denies a crafter and records both the single-stitch revision and the no-preferred-frame limit in its narrative note.

Occurrence locators: 33, 39, 146; Glossary: 222; Notes: 237, 238, 244.

PB — The Possible Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 92.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

RB1 maps yarn to res potentia and garment to actual spacetime, explains the single-transaction revision, and restricts the continued reality of unused yarn so that rejected outcomes cannot later occur for that settled event.

Occurrence locators: 67, 73, 74, 96.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Domain-specific mechanisms and wider analogies remain distinguished. Original definitions retain their scope; local cross-references do not rewrite them. Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.