Then how do you explain the existence of time dilation as proven in the Hafele-Keating experiment? If there is no time, how can we measure the effects upon it by accelerating or decelerating clocks through space? As I understand it, the clocks on the space shuttle and ISS have to be continually adjusted to synch with clocks on earth because they run faster in orbit than clocks on earth.
Well, Jason... this is the thing about any theory--- its imaginary...
In recording events we THINK we are capturing something about time... but in point of fact at what point can we or do we EVER use the information captured?
Why, Now, of course. EVERYTHING happens NOW. And only now.
Here's where it gets freaky and hard to follow... you have been told that speed affects Time... that at the speed of light, time stops.
Consider that... A photon leaves the surface of a star, travels for 100 million years, and hits the back of your stargazing retina and you perceive it. Yet, from the perspective of the photon, there is no time elapsed, the moment of its creation and the moment of its impact on your retina are the SAME moment in time. And if no time elapsed, then no distance could have been traversed... the photon's perspective is that the surface of that star and your retina were the same point in space.
Sounds like malarky doesn't it? But this is perfectly true... the REASON photons have ZERO rest mass is that they have no substantive reality at all...They actually lack "being" in the ordinary sense.
Now, you call to mind that Spacecraft traveling at different speeds, in different places will all have different rates of time...
But how does that effect the NOW?
It doesn't. Even though time dilates, everything happening on the slow space ship is happening in the exact same NOW as everything happening on the fast space ship.
Dilation looks like this
TickTickTickTickTickTickTickTickTickTickTickTickTickTick versus
T i c k T i c k T i c k T i c k T i c k T i c k T i c k T i c k
Where even the letters are fatter...
And the NOW is a bar like the playhead on a UTube video. that scrubs across both at the same speed and at the same moment.
This is why Einstein proves that there is no such thing as commensurability.. Everything happens at the same time- now, but the time itself, the events themselves are not commensurate.
Here's a way to visualize it... you know those Crawls at the bottom of CNN and Fox news screens? Some of them run slow, and some of them run fast...
Now imagine adding more so that some are running so fast they are just a blur, some so slow, that you can not even perceive they are moving...
Now- imagine all those ticker tape crawls cutting across the screen at all different angles, such they they all happen to cross the center of the screen at the same point.
Those crawls, they are different dilations of time... But that point where they ALL cross... that is the NOW....
And what we experience, really and for true, is JUST that spot. Because the crawls themselves do not exist... just the single spot where all that information is coinciding at all different rates all at once.
The fact that I can record history ( in the now) and read about what the now was like before ( reading it in the now) does not lend that history any reality.
In other words, REMEMBERING an event is not the same thing as the event happening.
Our memories and ability to imagine the future create a narrative in our head that SEEMS to imply time.
But, no kidding, there is not one iota of evidence anywhere that time is anything but a conceptual construct born of imagination.
Now is never the same... always in flux. Nothing but the
now has any being whatsoever.