The notion of time as a dimension is a function of our physiology. As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. Codified as measures of duration. "What a clock measures."

The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events form 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.

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

Society functions by synchronizing our behaviors as a larger communal organism, based on the same languages, rules and measures, so it might seem there should be some universal flow of time, but in nature everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

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

Energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past. Though it is the gut processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the forms/information and the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

Consequently the intellectual obsession with form over substance, math over physics.