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 a unit of measurement. Usually we measure things by how much time it takes for something to happen. We could also measure time as the interval between something happening.
An example would be 1 year is how long it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun. An orbit could be described as ~365.25 days.
The universe doesn’t care about time. It simply goes from one frame of existence to the next guided by the laws of physics.
As for timelines, or time travel. That cannot exist as the universe only ever exists in its current form. We can remember 3 days ago, but 3 days ago no longer exists because it has become today.
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