Nicholas,
I would say the first place to start is with the issue of time.
As mobile organisms, our sentience has evolved into a sequential observation and decision making process, in order to navigate. We further attenuate this by narrating our journeys to each other and building civilizations out of the collective knowledge. This makes that narrative flow, from past to future, foundational to our understanding of reality.
The problem is that it is action and change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
Even Theoretical Physics incorporates the narrative effect into their geometric modeling, with measures of duration correlated with measures of duration, to create this modern equivalent of crystalline spheres, called spacetime.
Duration is the present, as events coalesce and dissolve.
Different clocks can run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think metabolism, or frequencies.
Time is asymmetric, because action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both.
There is no dimension of time, because the present consumes the past, in order to be informed by it. Aka, causation and conservation of energy.
The present is not a point between past and future, but the configuration of this property called energy.
Arguing against the simultaneity of the present, because different events can be observed 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. It is the energy that is conserved and thus present. The fact the information it creates, changes, is what causes time in the first place.
So energy goes from prior to succeeding configurations, as these forms coalsce and dissolve. As individuals, we go from being in the future, at birth, to being in the past, at death. While the process of life goes onto future generations, shedding old. Consciousness goes past to future, as thoughts go future to past.
As an effect, time is like temperature, pressure, color, etc. All fundamental to the process of life, but just not sequential, like our brain function.
We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but that doesn’t make them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space.
Then again, the 3 dimensions of space are a mapping device, the xyz coordinate system. They are no more foundational to space, than longitude, latitude and altitude are foundational to the biosphere of this planet.
Take away all physical properties from space and it has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium. Infinite, as it has no bounds and equilibrium is implicit in GR. The frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler is closest to this equilibrium of the void. The absolute zero.
So space is the absolute and the infinite.
Within space are mass and energy. Energy radiates to infinity, or at least until it crests, while mass/form coalesces to the absolute zero of black holes, or otherwise radiated back out in the process. What does “fall in,” seems to be shot out the poles, as quasars.
Everything else is the cosmic convection cycle formed between the two.
As organic beings, we evolved a digestive, respiratory and circulation system to process the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to process the form and information coalescing out of this process. Motor and steering.
That’s my view on where science will eventually go.
