Time is an abstract entity

Abstract

The common discourse about the flow of time is wrong; the sophisticated discourse about the relativity of time is also wrong, but for different reasons. Time does not flow because it does not exist in the objective sense, as an ingredient of the physical reality. The physical reality constantly changes its manifest shapes: things are becoming and vanishing. People project their experience of change onto the coordinate of their space of discourse, called time. Time is the abstract means by which people express and measure the amount and intensity of change. The assumption that the coordinates of the space of discourse are parts of the physical reality and that they are ‘malleable’, is structurally wrong and it leads to inconsistent discourse. Some devoted adherents of ‘Einstein's revolution’ describe it as ‘frustratingly unfinished’. I argue that this revolution is structurally and logically flawed, so that it cannot be finished; it should better be abandoned.