The metaphor of time as a river is often dismissed as poetic, yet when formulated carefully it becomes a precise conceptual tool rather than a mystical image.
In this view, the past is not a location but a region of realized structure: configurations of matter and fields that have undergone temporal fixation. What we call "memory," "history," or "cause" corresponds to states in which the temporal field has settled into stable forms.
The present is not an instant but a front: a moving interface where temporal structure is still forming. It is the only region in which dynamics occur. Physics happens not in time as a passive container, but through this advancing temporal front.
The future is not a place that already exists. It is the absence of form - a region where has not yet been structured. It is not "ahead" in space, but unrealized in the temporal medium.
Within this picture, motion in space acquires a concrete meaning: it is the result of a local tilt or inhomogeneity in the temporal flow. A body moves because its internal temporal state is not aligned with the surrounding temporal field. Spatial trajectories are therefore projections of temporal gradients.
Inertia becomes transparent. A moving object persists in motion because it occupies a stationary configuration with respect to the temporal flow - a stable vortex in the river. No external "support" is required, because the motion is sustained by the structure of time itself.
Matter, in turn, is not something placed inside time. It is a pattern made of time: a self-maintaining structure in the temporal field, much like an eddy in a flowing fluid. Its stability reflects coherence in ; its mass reflects resistance to changes in that coherence.
This metaphor explains, without additional assumptions:
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why motion has a direction,
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why inertia exists at all,
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why irreversibility appears,
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why "something happens" rather than nothing.
Importantly, this is not a belief statement. It is a disciplined analogy that compresses a large amount of physical content into an intuitive form. It does not replace equations; it guides them. When translated back into formal language, it leads directly to testable relations - such as the link between temporal gradients and force.
Classical physics deliberately avoids such questions. It describes how systems evolve, but refuses to ask why motion, direction, and persistence exist in the first place. The temporal-field perspective does not reject classical results; it explains them.
If the metaphor of the river feels compelling, it is not because it is poetic. It is because it is structurally isomorphic to the equations that describe motion when time is treated as a physical field.
In that sense, the river of time is not a story we tell about the Universe.
It is the simplest way to visualize what the equations are already saying. расширь