The universe is a giant quantum-mechanical relativistic Rube-Goldberg patchwork construct, knit by interactions of its constituents, changed and ever changing through these interactions.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and other stories

We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we hurry alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn’t fall behind. But it doesn’t, you see. Time just swirls around us. Everything is always present. The things we’ve done, the people we’ve loved, the people we’ve hurt, they’re all still here.... The lie of time. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been is present in the same place. But we still think the thing that has just happened, or is about to happen, we think that’s the most important thing. My memories aren’t memories, my present isn’t present, it’s all the same thing.

Richard Osman, The Last Devil To Die

 

The Dark

For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Time does not precede . . . the world. . . . Time is something that accompanies motion and bodies.”

 

The necessary connection of movement and time is real and time is something the soul (dhihn) constructs in movement.

 

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

All information is imperfect.

Jacob Bronowski 

Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.  The greater the slowing of time, the stronger gravity's pull....  At the surface of a black hole, time is slowed to a halt.

Kip Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

Consciousness was firmly embedded in the fabric of space and time, a material part of its vibrational energy.  Consciousness, or mind, was not split off from matter, hovering outside it.... Instead, consciousness was within matter, of matter.  It was matter looking at itself and being astonished.  It was the point seeing the wave, or the wave seeing the point.  Consciousness was quantum electrodynamism.  Time turned back upon itself.  Time splintering.  Time strutting loose among the energy levels, only slightly stilled, slightly caught, in that glance called consciousness, the observer, the energy that made it into this and not-this, live cat and dead cat.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music