The Whole Universe Catalog

We've returned to the Douglas Adams Gallery to take a better look at its contents - those holographic stills, or slivers that we previously considered. Together, they comprise a very large set. The universal set, in fact.  

Each element (elements of a set, not physical elements composed of identical atoms) is not 50 by 70 stitches, not even a million pixels, but the size of the universe. They're chronological atoms, if you like. They are the result of dicing up the universe with the scalpel of time.  

Each sliver has practically no duration. Its 'thickness' is that of one point's worth of time, just as in Euclidian geometry a line is one point across, and a plane is one point thick .

Now try a thought experiment. (It will only take one <ahem> moment.)

Shut your eyes and take a breath. Breathe slowly in and breathe out. At that point where the air ceases moving, imagine the click of a camera shutter. Visualize that moment digitized into a 3-D array of numbers. 

At a quick enough shutter speed - the crest of the shortest wave possible - you’d capture every atom, electron, particle right where it was (ignore the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). Every position of the universe would be filled in—or left empty—with the RGB equivalent of exactly what existed there. 

These are the items contained in the Douglas Adams Gallery. Its inventory has no option but to contain every possible (and impossible) status points of this or any other universe, in the past, in the future, both dreamt and imagined.

Now, storing all that information away unsystematically would not be useful. Therefore, we should explore the relationship between those slivers. What filing system would maximize the gallery's utility? 

So, our next job is to consider how slivers should best be organized. What possible relationships exist between them? Can we classify and arrange them in some sort of Periodic Table?