Marcel,
I understand you.
It is the concept of the relativity of simultaneity and it is in deed the way the universe is temporally organized. Each observer has his or her own notion of the present moment, and in this respect Einstein's theory has blurred the lines between past, present and future.
But even to the great Einstein, this realization was not necessarily welcome. He thought that the idea of the present moment had a special meaning for man that was distinct from the ideas of past and future. However, he was resigned to the realization that this difference could not be captured within our (current) scientific theories.
It is my contention, however, that Einstein's theory did not lead to a better way of understanding time but only to a better understanding of how to treat time in our equations. The question of what we really mean by "time" is still a wide open question.
Einstein's theory seems to imply that - at rest - we are all moving through time at the speed of light - as our motion through space increases our motion through time decreases and you have the phenomenon of time dilation. At all times, however, the total of our motion through time and our motion through space must equal the speed of light. This notion of motion through time is, in my opinion, merely a mathematical abstraction that allows us to properly treat time in our equations in a relativistic way.
In my book The Meaning of Time - A Theory of Nothing, however, I propose that motion through time is a real phenomenon. I propose that particles such as electrons and protons are at all times moving through time at the speed of light. There is a small amount of the particle's energy that is associated with this motion through time and that energy is the particle's rest mass. In other words, a particle's resistance to acceleration in space (inertia) is the particle's constant motion through time. As a particle is accelerated, more energy is required to maintain its motion through time at the speed of light. The particle also has a rotational energy that drives its internal periodic mechanism - the particle's internal clock. As the particle accelerates, part of this energy is diverted to motion through time and as a consequence the particle's internal clock slows (time dilation) and its mass increases.
I also propose the idea of temporal gauge invariance. From each person's perspective, the universe is in the past (by Einstein's definition) and - I propose- is a probability density that represents an infinity of ways that the universe may be configured - each possibility with the same amplitude for actualization (differing only in phase). Temporal gauge invariance simply implies that each particle's clock can run at its own rate while the global temporal template remains unchanged. The internal clock consists of six discrete interactions - two for each dimension of our three dimensional reality - and is repeated ad infinitum. This internal periodic mechanism collapses the individual particle's wave function in the present moment and the universe we experience is actualized. We live in a singular universe with the ability to configure itself in an infinity of ways based on these localized temporal interactions.
That is the essence of time in my theory.
Gene T. Yerger
