Demoting Time: A Self-Consistent Interpretation of Relativity Without "Time"

This paper advances a core claim: within the framework of relativity, "time" should not be regarded as a physical entity on par with space, much less as a so-called fourth dimension. Time is merely a cognitive tool that observers use to measure the sequential order of material motion in three-dimensional space. Traditional interpretations reify "time" as an entity and, on the basis of this erroneous presupposition, construct concepts such as "time dilation," "time reversal," and "the tilting of the now," thereby generating logical contradictions and intuitive paradoxes. This paper systematically dismantles this presupposition and proposes a self-consistent interpretation grounded in the axiom of Information Primacy: information is the fundamental substrate of the universe; any physical process—its occurrence, transmission, and transformation—necessarily consumes an information budget. From this axiom, three principles are derived. (1) The vacuum has an absolute information transmission limit. (2) Spatial motion occupies the channel capacity of information transmission, causing a reduction in the information reception rate for external observers, while the moving object's own internal process rhythm remains unaffected in inertial frames. (3) Accelerated motion consumes additional information budget, requisitioned directly from the budget sustaining the observer's own internal processes, causing a genuine and irreversible compression of rhythm. This framework draws a strict distinction between two types of overhead—communication overhead and acceleration overhead. Communication overhead is the channel capacity consumed in overcoming the velocity difference when information is transmitted between observers; it does not affect any observer's own internal process budget. Acceleration overhead is an expenditure directly requisitioned from an observer's internal process budget when overcoming their own inertia, resulting in a genuine compression of their own rhythm. By means of the equivalence principle—resisting gravity is equivalent to paying acceleration overhead—these three principles unify the explanation of uniform motion, accelerated motion, and gravitational effects within a single conceptual scheme. Gravity is not a force occurring within the information channel; it is an attribute of the information channel itself. The essence of the universal gravitational constant G is a measure of the resistance coefficient of the information transmission channel. This interpretation requires no participation of "time" as an entity, eliminates the need for ad hoc patches such as "acceleration breaks the symmetry," and is fully symmetric across all inertial reference frames. This paper argues that this minimalist framework is more self-consistent and more intuitive than traditional geometric interpretations, providing a physically self-consistent interpretation of relativity without the need for a temporal entity.