What if it's a matter of the premises being wrong?
We model time as the present moving past to future, but 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.
Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes.
It's just that as these mobile creatures with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we think of it as the point of the present moving past to future, but then we still see the sun as rising in the east and setting in the west.
Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of particular actions and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.
Different clocks can run at different rates because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. Its activity creates time.
Yet physics is all about the information which can be observed.
As these organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous sytem sorts through, judging and organizing the forms precipitating out.
As the energy is the present, it goes from one form to the next, past to future, while the forms rise and fall, future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.
Think of a wave; The energy drives it, while the forms we perceive, the fluctuations and undulations, giving rise to frequencies and amplitudes, are the forms being created and dissolved.
So we try to understand reality in terms of the forms it presents our senses, ignoring the energy creating them, because it is "fuzzy" and our minds like clarity.
Yet these forms continue to seem ghostly, no matter how deeply we probe.
Not that I hold any hope for the current generation of theorists, as they obsess over the math, rather than the actual physics.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
Map versus territory.
