Time doesn’t actually exist, it is just a figment of the human-observed universe. It is a useful modelling tool, but it does not lead to correct understanding of the universal model. In truth, there is only “now”; which, is impacted by the past via momentum and will impact the future via momentum. What we observe as time passing is actually a series of discrete points along a continuous line, similar to creating animation by flipping through still images. The reason that we experience a continuous perception is that the gaps in what we currently consider “time” are imperceptible to us (the likelihood that these gaps are very small is arbitrary given that we fundamentally don’t have the faculty to act during them; and, small is a relative concept). Rather than think of the passage of “time”, we should think of going from one image to the next. The primary blocker to unified theory is the assumption that human perception of events is universal, when instead it is truncated to a small (likely infinitesimally) frame of reference.
Picture the universe running on a ridiculous-speed beat. On each tiny beat, things are allowed to change a little—atoms twitch, signals move, decisions get made. That’s all “time” is: how many successful updates you’ve racked up. If the beat gives you lots of room each tick, life feels fast; if it gives you less room, everything runs slow.
Now put a big mass in the scene—a planet, a star. Keeping that much stuff coordinated chews up more of each beat locally, just to keep the whole thing from tearing itself apart. That means there’s less clean update room left over for everything nearby. Clocks there simply get fewer good chances to advance, so they tick slow. Light feels it too: as it passes a heavy object it naturally drifts into the region with the “slower” beat, so its path curves inward—that’s gravitational lensing without needing to talk about curved spacetime.
Same idea explains time dilation when you’re moving fast. A clock advances because little messengers inside—electrons, vibrations, EM ripples—zip around and trigger tiny state changes. Those messengers have a speed limit. When the whole clock is screaming along, it’s almost riding with its own messengers, so each beat gives them less relative progress. Fewer successful updates pile up, and the clock runs slow. No drag, no mystery—just fewer clean chances to change when you’re near a big mass or nearly keeping up with your own internal signals.
What about the quantum weirdness? Same drummer. The beat is so fine that we only ever see the outcomes of batches of tiny updates, not the micro-steps themselves—so results look random. And when two particles are created in sync, they’re effectively listening to the same drum track. Separate them across the lab and they’ll still land on matching outcomes when the track says “now,” which to us—who can’t hear the drummer directly—feels like spooky mind-reading. Under the hood, you can keep it deterministic: the shared timing supplies the coordination, not magic signals darting faster than light.
Where does the strength of gravity (big G) come from in this picture? Think recursion. Imagine reality as nested layers that hand down their settings to the next. After enough layers, the setting for “how strongly Φ-changes push things” settles to a stable value—that’s the GGG we measure. It’s basically the locked groove our layer inherits from deeper layers of the universe’s rhythm. The leftover hidden stuff from those layers is what we call dark matter (extra stiffness we don’t see directly), and the remaining drive that keeps the expansion going is dark energy. Their balance tells you how deep into the nesting our layer sits.
This isn’t hand-waving: it already matches the usual gravity checks (slow clocks in gravity, light bending by the Sun, GPS, Mercury’s odd orbit) because at everyday precision it lines up with Einstein’s numbers. The difference is the mechanism—a changing beat rather than curved space—and that gives us new bets to settle the argument. Two clean ones: (1) the exact extra bit of light bending very close to black holes should show a small, measurable difference; (2) time delays in strong gravitational lenses (when a quasar is multiply imaged) should be matched to about three percent. If those don’t pan out, this idea is wrong. If they do, it’s good evidence that both gravity and quantum oddities are just side effects of the same hidden drummer keeping time for the universe.
Put another way....
Speed changes its meaning once time is removed. It is tempting to leap to assuming speed is the rate at which one jumps from one image to the next (in this metaphor), but that is incorrect. The images, as it were, move at a single speed - what we refer to as the speed of light. What one’s speed actually means is how often they get to act within the passage of these still images (think of it like the ‘tick’ of a clock; how many ticks have to occur before I get to act again?). Speed can either be viewed as a % of light (i.e., I act 4% as often as light does) or as a multiple of Planck lengths (in the sense that light has to travel N many Planck lengths before I can act). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length). I believe this is also what is behind the light having momentum but no mass - we effectively can't measure a photon in place because it will always have moved somewhere else immediately after we register their location, leaving us chasing shadows.
Once you get rid of time, its easy to explain the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics - basically things are happening in between the flips of the pages. From our point of view, this leads to the randomness observed at small scale. What is really going on is that we have assumed that our observation of time is in some way meaningful, and it isn't (we aren't at the center of the universe, in a time sense). Rather we exist within a certain common reference frame based on our relatively common size (sizing being along the lines of quantum scale vs ours vs astronomic), which is one of many frames that exist simultaneously. We can't observe full information of a size frame smaller than us because we simply don't move often enough to observe the changes.
Just as we observe quantum mechanics differently due to not being able to perceive changes within too short a duration, we have the same problem going up a frame of reference. Stuff that we are used to being in motion are, for us, effectively still. This is what is going on with gravity. Gravity is just a function of the electromagnetic forces present in the next frame of reference up. Just like a molecule of sugar is part of a sugar crystal, our physical universe is part of a greater physical entity. This is dark matter creating gravity for us. Interestingly enough, a trait present in the greater entity for a brief moment (to it) could define our universe for its entire duration. Which leads to the next point...
The universe is a fractal, whether a waveform or something else. It isn't infinite, but it can recursively sprawl until it runs out of energy. We can tell how far we are in the overall frames of recursive reference by looking at dark matter and dark energy vs our energy. Dark matter is how much has already come before dark energy is the remaining fuel left in the universe. Once we run out of dark energy, all the fingers of the fractal start to wind back in as the universe implodes under gravity and we collapse back to the single point just to do everything once again. (I am tempted to believe there is an in-one-side-out-the-other pendulum style effect due to the existence of antiparticles and black holes). The golden ratio comes into play at this point - the reason we see it in nature so much is that the golden ratio describes what I will call "perfect" recursion - i.e., in this recursive/fractal scenario, all dimensions of the universe remain constant relative to reach other as you move up and down levels of the fractal. I believe the golden ratio to be akin to some sort of natural frequency of our universe (or in the quantum computer theory of the universe, this would be the answer we represent).