Time has no dimensionality or physical existence

Abstract

The author had been focusing on various treatments of time in physics for decades. The author felt that there were major shortcomings in the treatment of time in relativity and even in Newtonian physics. Then the author took a very pragmatic look at how time was actually treated in GPS to achieve a high precision, real world, working, physics system. The author thought that the actual GPS approach might yield a pragmatic time construct for physics. GPS does NOT use special relativity’s construct of time—but rather an observer independent construct as detailed below. The author put “Philosophical Time” musings aside and focused solely on finding the right physics construct for time. Finding that proper time was all that physics required, it dawned on the author, quite to his surprise, that proper time also met all the needs of philosophical time. Furthermore, an even deeper physics insight was that “proper time” is simply a measure of a stable physical process’ cycles. Hence, “time” as a separate physical entity disappeared to be replaced by physical processes each with its own idiosyncratic length/duration, all of which can be related to each other. These cyclic and noncyclic processes are all driven by known physical forces and energy sources. The properties of time, except for dimensionality, are actually just properties of each individual process that unfolds within 3D space and time is an emergent, human, generalization of process lengths.