The nature of time

Time is change.  Perceived time is relative to the total energy of a particle and its environment.  Spacetime is a field of potential energy governing motion.  I've gone over all this before, but now I have something even simpler.

Proper (perceived) time is potential energy.  Period.  What kind of potential energy?  All of it.  The less energy is used by a particle, the faster time runs for it.  Proper time is properly (hah!) measured in imaginary units, but we see its effects in our real-valued universe, and its measure is almost always squared.  (The square of i is -1, by definition.)  So we mostly ignore its imaginary nature, except that comes back to bite us in general relativity, which is why the (squared) time element of the spacetime metric is negated.  (Or all three space axes are negated instead.  Same difference.)

For those not familiar with the math/geometry, the imaginary axis is 90 degrees to the real axis, satisfying the need for dimensions to be perpendicular to each other.  The imaginary direction can also represent a rate of change, satisfying the nature of time itself.

This explains spinors, by the way.  What we perceive as 360 degrees of rotation is really 180 degrees in a complex field, of which we can only measure the real valued portion.  We have no means of experiencing or measuring the imaginary valued portion, except to note that after a single passage from like to like values, the direction is opposite what we would expect.  That's exactly what happens when you rotate a point along a circle in a complex plane - the real value goes from +1, through 0, to -1.  It then passes back through 0 to +1 again.  What we perceive as two rotations is really a single one, but in a complex plane which we cannot directly perceive.  Especially when you square the function, eliminating the negative portion entirely (but leaving the problem of opposite directions to every other wave).

This is most likely the root cause of neutrino oscillation.  We simply can't directly perceive things outside of our real-valued, three dimensional space.

Yes, I realize this may sound a bit incoherent.  It's all a beautifully simple whole in my head which I have a hard time explaining.  Yes, I do realize what I just wrote.  Go ahead and laugh, but when you're done laughing, please think.  Many of these ideas are not original to me.  Minkowski himself wrote time as an imaginary component when he created the math behind 4-D spacetime and general relativity.  It was later simplified to a negative squared term, leaving out the explanatory "i".  That "i" is the whole reason for the negative term in the spacetime metric, and the cause of hyperbolic spacetime.  Euclidean space + imaginary time = hyperbolic spacetime.  The geometry is simple.  The math is horrific.

Oh, and to reiterate - there is a maximum and minimum energy density, resulting in (or from) a maximum and minimum flow of time.  Time cannot run backwards, because there can't be negative potential energy.  Time cannot exceed a certain rate, because there cannot be negative energy.  (Energy in a different direction is not negative, it's merely opposite.)