The pages so far have kept to a modest claim, and it is still a claim, not a finding forced by the examples alone. What is seen is change. On the distinction offered here, the word “time” either gathers that change or measures it. Three vectors of place fix a static configuration. Motion appears in the account when change of place is added to the frame. Nothing in that yet requires a further thing that flows, causes, or contains. “Yet” is the point of this page. It says what follows if the claim is granted, and what would count against granting it.
If the claim is granted, several familiar pictures lose their support. They do not become false as experiences. They become descriptions that were doing more work than the evidence so far has required.
Events do not, in general, run back. An egg scrambles and does not unscramble. Heat leaves a cup and does not gather itself again. A body accumulates damage it does not spontaneously undo. This one-way character is often called the arrow of time, as if time itself pointed.
A scale does not point. The dimension of change can be read in either direction on the page; the numbering is ours. What does not reverse, in these cases, is the change. In anything compounded of many processes, the processes do not all undo together. Energy has spread. The earlier arrangement is not recovered by wishing the clock label to run backwards.
So the direction, on this account, belongs to change, and it is not one direction for the world as a single object. A simple isolated process may be reversible. A scrambled egg is not one process. It is a vast number of changes that will not reassemble. The proposal is that there are as many arrows as there are such histories, not a universal time with a single head. “Arrow of time” borrows the direction from the changes and then awards it to the word. Theories of asymmetry are not thereby replaced; the note below says which family this sentence is nearest to.
A diamond sits, barely weathered, for what the surrounding clocks call millions of years. It is tempting to say that time passed for it, or that it persisted in time, as if existence were a journey through a medium and the medium had to be supplied.
Look at the stone. Between the changes that do happen to it, it is as it is. Nothing further is occurring in it. The Earth’s rotations, the clocks, the lives around it, are other changes, used afterwards to put a number on the gap. The number is a comparison with those external processes. It is not, on this reading, a substance the diamond was soaking in, and not a tunnel it had to travel in order to still be there.
This is the persistence worry in ordinary dress. An object exists. To exist from one of our labels to a later label, it seems to need a stretch of time to exist in. The proposal is that the stretch is the comparison. Unchanging, the object simply is. The external series calibrates the interval. It does not confer a temporal interior on the object. Ageing is different, and it does not rescue the picture: a body persists through change because the chemical processes continue, not because a carpet of time is rolled out ahead of it. A reader who thinks existence itself requires a temporal dimension has a real objection. It is met only if no work is left for that dimension once the comparison is stated. That is the residue test again.
Grant the scoring claim, and two words that seemed to prove time’s existence can be restated without it.
A period is a stretch picked out by a beginning and an end. The jog starts, the jog stops. Those two changes bound the stretch. Until some external regular change — a stopwatch, the Earth’s rotation — is set beside it, the stretch has no size. The size is the comparison. “Half an hour” means: this much of the clock’s constant change accumulated between the start and the stop. It does not mean: a portion of a temporal stuff was used up.
A duration is that size. It is how much change the chosen scale assigns to the stretch. Two durations differ when the compared changes differ, including when two clocks take different paths and disagree on reunion. Duration, on this restatement, is a reading, not a piece of time cut from a block.
Interval is the same notion under another name: the comparison attached to the gap between two events. For a single unchanging object, considered alone, this account finds no interval inside it. The interval appears when an outside series is allowed to score the gap. That is why a universal time is not required, here, to make sense of “how long.” How long is how much of some change, set against some other change.
A few further claims usually smuggle the extra object back in. They loosen, on the same terms, if the scoring claim is granted. They are not each given a theory of their own.
Ageing, in the cases already used, is the biochemical sequence, scored by whatever clock we trust, not time allowing a body somewhere to grow old. The past, on this reading, is an earlier configuration of things, remembered or recorded, not a place that still exists along a line. The future is a configuration that has not happened. A beginning of time, if it means anything empirical, is the first change we can talk about; with no change, the word has nothing to gather and nothing to measure. Travel into another configuration of the whole world is a fantasy about recreating every state at once, not a journey through a dimension shown to be already there, waiting.
None of these rephrasings is a proof that no further structure could ever be required. They are what follows if the frameworks are only scoring change. A residual fact — a prediction or an explanation that still cannot be stated in those terms — would count against the claim. This argument has not produced such a residue from the usefulness of the word alone. That is a statement about the argument, not a literature review. A residue offered from elsewhere would have to be met, not defined away.
One habit has been touched and not finished. Mathematics writes a single *t* through an equation, steady and universal inside the calculation. Physics has often spoken as if that letter were the universal flow the diamond was soaking in. Constancy of day and year makes the slide easy. It has not yet been looked at on its own.
Optional — for specialists.
The claims on this page are conditional on the scoring thesis, not a general elimination of temporal structure. If change and the relations used to compare it discharge the roles usually given to time, then the arrow, persistence, period and duration can be restated without a further temporal constituent. A residual prediction or explanation that cannot be so restated would count against the restatement.
Asymmetry is not treated as an intrinsic direction of a temporal substance. The one-way character of compounded processes is the sort of fact already approached through statistical structure, boundary conditions and coarse-graining (Reichenbach, 1956). The page’s point is only that this direction belongs to the changes, and that there is no single arrow for every history.
Persistence is treated as existence across a comparison, not as occupation of a temporal container. An unchanging object, considered alone, has no internal process for an interval to measure. The interval appears when an external series is used to score the gap. That is a claim about relevance, not a denial that the object exists, and not a thesis about whether past or future events are real.
McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time, and the presentist, eternalist and growing-block family, are not the target. Those disputes concern the reality and extent of temporal structure granted as a topic. This page asks whether that topic has been distinguished from change and from the frameworks used to score it.
The criterion used to keep the claim conditional is set out in full in the accompanying paper.
