This is more like the version I learned, back in the 70's.
To second Don Head’s thoughts, the problem with treating time as a dimension is that as mobile organisms, with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we are schooled to the notion of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration.
The reality, though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this physical present, as events come and go, future to past.
There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Time is asymmetric because what is being measured, specific, predictable motions, are inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is not being measured and is a second order effect of the flux/increasing complexity of change.
Energy is “conserved,” because there is no physical past for it to recede into, or future from which it arrives, as it is the activity of this energy which creates time.
The present is not so much a dimensionless point between past and future, as it is the configuration of this energy.
Time then, is an effect, similar to temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes.
We could use ideal gas laws to 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.
Given much of human history has been about getting everyone following the same narratives, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, seeking the same goals, it might seem a given that there is a universal time, so we are surprised the same clock will run at different rates in different conditions, but everything is a function of context. The signal is just a node in the network of noise from which it is extracted.
There is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time etc. When everyone is playing the same game, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time. Yet the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died. Aka, metabolism.
So the energy, the process, churns along, past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while life moves 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 the patterns define and direct the process.
Consider this relationship between energy and form; Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Note that I didn’t say mass gravitates in, because there is the issue of missing mass, but if that’s one end of a full spectrum of energy coalescing as form, it might help to explain where that additional contraction/wave collapse might be. Energy expands, form condenses.
We have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through the signals precipitating out, the forms and patterns.
Though trying to make this argument to anyone with much of a formal education invariably raises the response of; “Where is your math?” Yet math is pattern. To the mathematician, there is only information versus chaos. Energy is not part of the picture.
Epicycles were brilliant math, in their day, but lousy physics. Not because all the details hadn’t been worked out, but because there was a very significant perceptual bias built into them. Much like time as a narrative dimension.
The map is not always the territory.
