This paper presents a core historical thesis: every major paradigm shift in physics has essentially been a revolutionary redefinition of the fundamental concept of "time". This holds true from Aristotle's time as measure of motion, Newton's absolute time, Einstein's spacetime unity, to the current time problem in quantum gravity. Following the 2019 comprehensive revision of the International System of Units (SI), 6 out of 7 base physical quantities are directly or indirectly defined via the second, making time the sole pillar of the entire modern physics measurement edifice. However, a deep blind spot has persisted throughout 300 years of physics history: we have always used time as the benchmark for measuring other physical quantities, yet we have never defined intrinsic operational rules for time itself from the perspective of the self-consistency of the measurement benchmark—the ruler has never been asked "whether it is self-contradictory". This paper diagnoses the manifestations of this blind spot (dark matter, dark energy, singularities, the quantum gravity impasse), analyzes the epistemological paradox of general relativity's "measuring curved spacetime with a curved ruler", and elaborates how Time Field Theory (TFT) remedies this by establishing self-consistent rules for the temporal ruler through the "time field flux conservation" meta-conservation law. Within the TFT framework, the aforementioned phenomena can be explained as natural consequences of the self-consistency constraints of the time field, eliminating the need to introduce additional entities such as dark matter and dark energy. This paper further argues that the next paradigm shift will inevitably revolve around a fundamental cognitive transformation of time, and TFT is the embryonic form of this revolution.
Huowang Huang (Wed,) studied this question.