The problem with our understanding of time is that as mobile organisms, navigating our environment, we experience our reality as flashes of perception, constantly sorting and judging them. Then learned to tell stories about our journeys, building civilizations out of the collected knowledge. So the narrative sense of time, as the point of the present moving past to future, is deeply embedded in our experience. Physics codifies this by treating time as measures of duration, correlating with measures of distance and modeling it as a dimension.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is this physical state, as the events form and dissolve.

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

Energy is conserved, because it is always and only present. Since it is the changing configuration of this energy creating the effect of time, there is no physical past for it to recede into, nor future from which it arrives.

So the process goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.

Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. That much of human history has been about getting everyone following the same narrative, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, it might seem there is a universal time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc. A faster rate uses energy/ages quicker.

Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes. Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

It took us awhile to figure the sun and stars weren’t actually moving east to west either….