Think of time as an effect, like temperature. You certainly wouldn't put your hand on a hot stove, but you know it isn't some fundamental property or dimension called temperature. It's just a way to measures the level of molecular activity. Much as an employment rate is a measure of economic activity.
It's just that as our minds function like a movie camera, as a series of frames of perception, that it seems like time is some fundamental property.
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 understand them as measures and effects of the underlaying dynamic. As conceptual abstractions. Like time is the effect of change and the measure of sequence/frequency.
Society is about getting everyone synchronized into a larger communal organism, using the same languages, rules, measures, so it might seem like there should be some universal flow of time, but the reason nature is and can be so diverse and so integrated, is because everything doesn't all march to the beat of the same drummer. Multiculture, not monoculture. Rabbit time and turtle time. The turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
We can look up at the night sky and see the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago, because it's all configurations of the energy. That the information it carries to our minds is constantly changing, is time.
You might say the left, logical side of the brain is the clock and ruler, seeing the waves cresting and refining the information generated. While the right, emotional side of the brain is the thermostat and barometer, feeling the energy of the waves building and receding, but not clear forms.
We are too confined by our current reductionist belief systems. You might say it's all in your mind like the internet is all in your phone. We have these little pocket devices that can transmit a lot of information on a little bit of radio waves, so wouldn't nature/biology have also developed similar abilities over its billions of years of evolution?
Do you ever see "floaters" in your vision? Those little bubbles moving about in the intermediate spaces. I was quite young when I first sensed they were other peoples and creatures conscious focus, intersecting my own and didn't really know if other people saw them, until I heard the term, "floater." Yet it seems most people think they are just imperfections to eyesight, not connections to the outer reality.
I grew up as a younger child on a farm, mostly race horses and dairy cattle, so I have a good sense of that intersection between nature and human culture, so rather than trying to model the world as a machine, or a computer, I see it in very organic terms. Whether something is healthy, or sick. Growing, aging etc.
to culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between righteousness and evil, while in nature, it's the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.
That's because it's the function of culture to get everyone synchronized into that larger organism, distinct from its environment, even if a part of it.
If you ask a tree what time is, it would tell you it's the cycle of expansion and consolidation of the seasons.
We evolved as tree swinging creatures, so our eyes are set close together to judge distances and we are very tactile. Land based prey animals have eyes set wide apart, because they have to be more spatially aware and not distracted, lost in thought.
Then when we became bipedal land creatures, we turned those qualities into being able to throw sticks and stones. Which makes us think reality is about objects and how they interact, from individuals to atoms to quanta. Yet these are the nodes in the networks.
The wave behavior tends to synchronize, which is centripetal. A laser is synchronized light waves. While the energy radiating away interacts with everything it encounters, so it harmonizes across the space. Black holes to black body radiation.
The reason why they can't find the dark matter to explain all the gravitational effects is because they have it backwards. Gravity isn't a property of mass, rather mass is an intermediate effect of this centripetal dynamic, that goes from the barest bending of the light, to the vortices at the center of galaxies.
Space is not so much three dimensional, as three dimensions are an abstract mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. The two primary qualities of space are infinity and equilibrium. Which is implicit in Relativity, as the frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock would be the one closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero. So space is the absolute and the infinite.
Think in terms of a number line, from zero to infinity.
Energy radiates out, toward infinity, while structure coalesces in, toward equilibrium. Both of which are entropic.
We fluctuate in the middle.
