Tim,

Think about the two aspects you present; Form(things, structure, etc) and energy.

Consider a wave; The energy is what drives it, while the forms, the fluctuations we perceive, rise and fall.

We can't describe the energy, except as the forms it expresses. These would seem to be opposite sides of the same coin. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the forms coalescing into more distilled forms. It seems like a pretty basic relationship.

We think of time as the point of the present moving past to future, yet the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it is always and only present. It manifests reality. Its changing configuration creates time.

So the energy goes past to future, while the forms it creates go future to past. Like the wave, the energy carries it along, as the fluctuations come and go.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts it manifests come and go, future to past.

So why is physics mostly focused on the very large and the very small, but ignores the middle? Is it because our thought process is about form and differentation, while energy is fuzzy and only explicible in terms of the forms it manifests and those are most distinct at the extremes?

Why do we model time as a dimension, rather than an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color, sound? Is it because as mobile organisms, our understanding of reality is defined by the sequence of perceptions fuana evolved as a function of navigation, as well as the narrative based culture humanity developed?

The fact is that epicycles were brilliant and predictively accurate math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, though the crysalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation. Our models are only maps of what we perceive, not the territory. We shouldn't assume we haven't incorporated similar assumptions in our current models.