I’ve been thinking about relativity where the passage of time depends on your velocity, but I don’t really understand what this means physically. I understand that the clocks of two different people traveling at different relative speeds will be different, but what does this really mean? Does this imply that time is a physical quantity, like energy, and that depending on your speed you have less of it? To make this more complicated, my understanding is that it’s not just clocks that will be different, it’s the actual “age” of physical things; ex: if I’m traveling at the speed of light I can go infinite distance and to me it would be like waking from a coma, I would have no memory of traveling at all, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t happen. I guess I just don’t really understand what this means about the physical nature of time; is it a tangible quantity like matter or is it more like a byproduct of something else and what we call “the passage of time” is just how we measure it (ex: if I heat up a gas and the atoms get more disordered then it’s entropy has increased, but I can measure temperature and use that as a proxy for entropy).
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Time is the letter “t” on a spacetime diagram.
I know that sounds like an unsatisfying answer, but that’s the truth. Physics is definitely interested in exploring the nature of reality, however this nature is done by measuring and describing reality through a collection of indices by which we order the universe. One of those indices we just call “t”.
In fact, you could argue Physics does less to reveal the universe than to simply explain how the universe behaves how our indices demand, but no actual insight into those indices themselves.
Your question, while fair to ask, isn’t truly a “Physics” question. No gatekeeping intended, just new thought.
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