Just traipsing off the yellow brick road into the meta-physical realm for a bit, don’t mind me.
I was contemplating the nature of things earlier today. What things? All things…people, objects, space, time, the whole shabang as they say.
Our concepts of the world around us and how we analyze it (science) is abstract, it is centered on the human experience. Even if you get to the fundamentals of how we describe all things that exist: measurements of time and space. Our most basic description of all things that exist are the concept of matter and energy moving through space over time. All of our thoughts, sentience, emotions, art, etc. are simply meta-physical expressions of the human mind which is simply an organic collection of nodes triggered by physical impulses: matter and energy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s miraclous what happens there, by some divine design or by evolutionary chance.
But I put forth the idea that time and space themselves are only concepts the human mind imposes on what exists to better comprehend and describe the universe. All that truly exists is the physical: matter and energy. E=mc2 as someone once put it so succinctly. Two sides of the same coin, albeit not in the same proportions, somehow inexorably linked by the speed of light.
Matter and energy exist, and behaviors are defined by a set of rules on these two. The relationships between unique matter and energy are sometimes linked (causal) and sometimes not linked (non-causal). I turn the heat on the stove with a pot of water over it, it boils, causal. I call someone on a Friday afternoon, I drive my car the next week to work, non-causal.
I argue that time is a construct. Time itself is measured in physical activity of energy and matter: the basic unit of time is defined as the rate of radioactive decay of a particular particle (cesium I think). This is again one of those unexplainable but still extant rules of the universe that govern particles of matter and energy. The infrared energy from a stove causes liquid water to convert to gaseous form (steam), i.e. it boils. This takes ‘time’. True the series of physical interactions are linked (causal), but our concept of time is simply an attempt to constrain these events into a set of boundaries. The water, pot, and heat from the stove have no concept of time and don’t care about it either.
We have to learn to be able to see beyond our limited notion that all things occur over time in space. Physical interactions between matter and energy occur within certain universal laws. The observation of a series of these interactions is best conveyed in a one-way pathway of steps (the first step can never be revisited, despite our best sci-fi). It’s not that time travel is impossible, there is no such thing as time travel to even argue whether it is possible. There is no time travel forward, and none backwards. A nearly infinite number of physical interactions occur (electrons flow between atoms and electric current runs through the brain, thus, you have a thought; water runs down a slope due to gravity) independent of some, caused by others. This seeming chain of interactions seems to occur over time as memory (organic, electronic) observes one interaction, the next, the next, and so on in a seemingly linked fashion and thus replays them as motion in space.
If space exists, then particles do move through space over time, as their motion is observed. But if space does not exist as the construct we understand it to be, than there is no motion through it, just as there is no time over which this motion occurs. Matter and energy at their most fundamental levels behave according to certain forces that interact between all particles. Physics has not yet neatly wrapped these up in a single package: the strong force, weak force, gravity, etc. At an even smaller level, unexplainable quantum physics takes over. This is fodder for the argument that our current fundamental understanding of the universe is at best limited, at worst flawed. Causality seems to be broken at this level (the cause of something can happen after the effect) amongst other things. Distance (the concept of measuring space) is irrelevant to a particle: the laws (gravity, strong force, quantum rules, etc.) apply to a finite (albeit large) set of particles at a certain level. These rules affect the ‘next’ (there is no next if there is no time) interactions in a causally linked list of interactions. Interstellar dust is gravitationally attracted together again and again, then collisions occur, etc. etc. Voila! There’s a planet, or a star.
We can use the concept of space and distance (and again, motion over time through this space) to describe the particles and their progress. And I don’t blame us for doing it, there’s really no other way our minds can comprehend. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a full understanding of what is happening. I guess what I’m getting at, is that our concepts of time and space are certainly valid (I certainly don’t have the education or credentials to argue against that!), but that we need to keep in mind that there may be more beyond those concepts. Once we pull back the curtain a little and understand more, we may better be able to explain some of the unexplainable occurences we see in quantum physics and elsewhere. My hypothesizing may have just been random ranting, but that’s what I was getting at.
I’m not trying to go off the deep end here. Trust me, I still believe in the world around me, and emotions, and space and time. Even I can’t fully buy into these concepts, they’re just something I was pondering earlier. I have no idea if what I’m thinking is correct and will be seen as such 1000 years from now or more, or if it’s just total crack. 
I vote for total crack. Bon soir everyone!