Thank you for taking the time to discuss, Alamo-girl. :-)
[Interestingly, if there exists another expanded dimension of time - then what we experience as an arrow of time (past, present, future) traveling a worldline is the illusion. Time itself would be a plane or volumetric - past, present, future existing concurrently in the continuum of space/time.]
I don't believe time necessarily exists independently from the system in which it is observed. I see it as simply an observed progression of state change. Under special relativity, the rate of change in state is relative to the Mass within the inertial frame, which increases with E. More speed = more E = more Mass = greater inertial resistance to state change = "time" slowing down as speed increases.
The observed gravitational lensing often attributed to the pull of "dark matter", can be explained if the space itself, through which light is traveling, is not uniformly dense. IOW, there are regions of space not dense enough to have manifested the strong physical forces required for the formation of matter - but still dense enough to produce the observable weak force of gravity - and thus the observed effect of gravitational lensing. I believe this is consistent Riemannian geometry, applied localy.
I simplify my view of the cosmos by thinking of it as a flat plane with points of localized distortion that bind the plane up into 3 dimensions (sort of like a bed sheet that's wadded up in the laundry basket. Or better, like a stick of gum that's been chewed into a sticky wad). The degree of localized distortion being equivalent to E. As entropy progresses, space becomes flat again... ultimately flat and changeless. Wound down like a stopped clock in the hand of the One who created it all - who exists, incomprehensibly, beyond it all.
Incomprehensibly except for the relationship that was manufactured, by Him, when He became like one of us and allowed Himself to be sacrificed to effect the reconciliation of the Created with their Creator.
Thank you so very much for sharing your views, dear LomanBill! Truly, not everyone has a sense of time as an actual dimension as I do and as MHGinTN does. (sorry for not pinging you earlier, dear MHGinTN)
And for many physicists, time is the most mysterious of all challenges.
Incomprehensibly except for the relationship that was manufactured, by Him, when He became like one of us and allowed Himself to be sacrificed to effect the reconciliation of the Created with their Creator.
Indeed. And please forgive my failure to expand on the last point raised at post 19 in speaking of mathematical Platonism and Tegmark's cosmology that physical reality in four dimensions is actually a manifestation of mathematical structures which actually exist outside of space and time. To some of us his words, like Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", is math-speak for Logos, the Word, Jesus Christ, Creator of "all that there is" whether spiritual of physical.
In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. – John 1:1-4
Logos is also the root of the word "logic." To God be the glory!