It’s not like they haven’t been here before. As a modeling of our view of the cosmos, epicycles were brilliant math, but lousy physics, because the map wasn’t an objective view of the territory.

A similar mistake is currently being made with regard to time.

As mobile organisms, we have a sequential thought process, in order to navigate. Then narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge. Consequently the flow of time, from past to future, is foundational to our view of reality. Physics codifies this flow by treating it as measures of duration, even if the actual dynamic is disputed and all events supposedly exist out on the temporal dimension.

The evident reality to anyone with minimal experience outside a classroom, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this physical state, as events coalesce and dissolve.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

Time is asymmetric, because what is being measured, action, is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. No space travel required.

That different events can be observed in different oder, 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. It’s the energy that’s conserved, not the information being manifest. It’s the changing configuration of the forms which creates time. The relative order of the system, entropy, is not what is being measured and is irrelevant.

So energy is “conserved,” because there is no physical past to recede into, or physical future from which it can arrive.

Time then, is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

So as this physical process churns along, past to future, the patterns generated go future to past.

Consciousness goes past to future, as thoughts go future to past.

Lives go birth to death, while life shuffles onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

The feedback is that the patterns define and direct the process. Motor and steering.

Though try to run this observation past anyone even remotely indoctrinated into the current paradigm will get you shunned.

So we have to hear about everything from determinism, to multi-worlds, because the whole concept of time is totally muddled.

As Alan Watts put it, with regards to determinism; The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.

There is only this present state and math is a crude modeling of some of the patterns emergent from it, without even understanding the processes generating those patterns.

Space, for instance, is no more foundationally three dimensional, than longitude, latitude and altitude are foundational to the surface of this planet. They are mapping devices. No more and no less.

I could go on, but this is getting to be one of my usual rants.

Actually, the extended rant; https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-confessions-of-a-cosmic-heretic-5cd4c044b8ea