What if the field of physics rose in some other culture, than the Northern, Western, linear, atomistic one in which it did?
Say more Southern and Eastern ones, where time is more circular and objects are interdependent with the context.
We are mobile organisms, necessitiating this sequential process of perception, in order to navigate, but is time really the point of the present, moving past to future, codified as measures of duration, or is it change, turning future to past. As in tomorrow bcomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
Duration as the present, as the events rise and fall.
In which case, 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 then asymmertic, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.
Different clocks run at different rates simply becuase they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
That civilization has been getting everyone working together, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, it might seem there should be some universal Newtonian flow of time, but there is rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
Energy is conserved, because it is the present. It creates time, so there is no physical past for it to be left in, nor future from which it arrives.
As well as temperature, pressure, colors and sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequence of thought, so they don't count as dimensions of space,
As process and present, energy goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
With the wave, energy drives it, as the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise. Thus this tendency to think in terms of order and chaos, rather than energy and form.
Is space three dimensional, or is that a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude?
If we remove everything we can sense from space, it would still have the qualities of infinity and equilibrium, which is implicit in Special Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler would be closet to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The unmoving void of absolute zero.
So space is the absolute and the infinite.
What fills space is this energy and the forms it manifests.
The energy radiates out, toward infinity, as the forms coalesce in, toward equilibrium. Both entropic.
The effect being galaxies, as comsic convection cycles.
As for the missing mass, what if we have it backward, rather than gravity as a proerty of mass, that mass is an effect of this inward curvature, that begins out where information is first coalescing and detectable, with photons and waves? The bending of the light isn't due to gravity, it is gravity. The energy cresting and falling back toward equilibrium.
Just some thoughts on the subject of physics. Safe to say, I'm one of the crackpots, out beyond the pale.
