Time reframes temporality as a product of system behavior rather than a universal background. Instead of treating time as an external dimension, the paper defines it as the ordered sequence a system generates when it recursively updates its own orientation. Because each system updates under its own constraints and capacities, every system produces its own time. The universe, updating globally and in parallel, is temporal but not timed; subsystems, limited to sequential update, fall into time and experience change as ordered flow. The paper develops the consequences of this operator definition across elasticity, synchronization, entropy, clocks, relativity, and the asymmetry between universal update and local sequence. The result is a unified account in which time is local, generated, and contingent—an artifact of recursion rather than a property of the universe.
Denis Bailey (Sun,) studied this question.