Epicycles were brilliant math.

Math is the map, the physical is territory. If assumptions about the territory, the axioms, are flawed, the math is flawed.

As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface between our body and its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration, correlating it with measures of distance.

The reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is a second order effect and not the regular rhythms usually measured as time.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, which are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought, but we don't mistake them for extensions of space.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That culture is about synchronizing society into a communal organism, using the same languages, rules and measures, it might seem like there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time and a shock to think otherwise, but the fact is that nature is so diverse and yet integrated, because the everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. Multicultural, not monocultural.

That different events will appear in different order from different locations is no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago, but it is the energy that's conserved, not the information. That the information changes is time.

The energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated form and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information.

So there is this tendency to try to understand reality in terms of the information, extracted from these flashes of perception, rather than the dynamics driving it all.

As for space, the three dimensions are just a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. The actual properties of space are infinity and equilibrium. The energy radiates toward infinity, as form coalesces toward equilibrium. Both entropic. Feedback loops between black body radiation and black holes.