If Timecube were not so insulting, I'd consider it an amateur independent discovery of Quadrature and the square root of negative one. Imaginary numbers. Not really imaginary though,
as it can be simply demonstrated with a pendulum above two rulers, which point north-south and west-east. If you are familiar with the ways these directions go on a Globe, then you will realize they are very much similar but certainly have special differences. As an analogy, you can go west and east forever. You cannot go north nor south forever, because those directions end at poles where you have no choice whatsoever of direction but toward the opposite pole. At the poles, time does not mean very much. The shadow of the "pole" (if it were an actual post in a hole) does form an hour hand though. If you go home, then either west or east, you eventually enter different time zones. In a very limited sense, going at a speed slightly faster than Sound, you may be able to go "forward and backward in time". Not really though, because you can't fly into the future to get winning lottery numbers and then go back to buy that ticket. This paragraph plays along too much with Timecubish ideas though.
Back to the pendulum, you can make it swing east-west, you can also make it swing north-south. There are two other cases and one is special and demonstrates quadrature and the square root of negative one. You can swing the pendulum in a circle. When you do that, you are swinging the pendulum equally north-south and east-west at the same time. It is obviously so from the point of view of the four ends of the rulers or any other direction. Thus the powers of the square root of minus one are the four directions. The imaginary number is in a direction that's away from the number line, and not on the number line, and that's why it must be an "imaginary" number. Because there are four directions, circular motion is possible, and the four directions of the circle are in quadrature. (There are four phases, just as in the lunar month). Any other direction is included also as a root of unity, which is sqr-1 to the power of a fraction or an irrational number.
The other case where you swing the pendulum in all 4 directions at the same time is from northwest to southeast, or northeast to southwest.This is also visible from all 4 compass directions. But imaginary numbers are only required to explain the circular or elliptical motions of the pendulum. Linear motion only requires motion along a Real Number Line.