(1) Time is the Structural Relationship

What is time? Philosophers and scientists have pondered this question for thousands of years. Zhang Yuanzhong said, In addition to serving as a timer for other things, they are themselves contained in the answer of "What is time?" but by no means the whole answer. The oversimplified answer that "time is a number of repetitions" equates time with a clock. The aging of plants and animals, the weathering of rocks, and the evolution of the universe do not have a "number of repetitions," but they all occur in time. Regarding the arrow of time, Zhang Yuanzhong said, The examples cited over the centuries include irreversible processes, the "principle of entropy increase" in thermodynamics, the creation and evolution of the universe, and so on. But these are examples, not the final answers to the arrow of time. "What is time?" There is still no complete answer to this question now, how can there be a final answer to its arrow? (Zhang Yuanzhong. "What is time? ". Science World,2009(6))

Some people say that time is a description of the relative speed of motion between objects, or a physical quantity measuring the length of the interval between two moments, these statements are wrong. Because the concepts of "speed of motion" and "moment" themselves need to be defined in terms of time, so the inclusion of these concepts in the definition of time is a circular definition. Some people say that time is the expression of movement and change, but there are many expressions of movement and change, such as images, sounds, symbols, etc., what is the difference between these expressions and time?

In order to explain the nature of time, we first analyze the relationship between two scenes and time. Scenario 1: There are two people in a classroom. Scenario 2: There is one person inside the classroom and another person outside the classroom. What's the difference between these two scenarios? It is obviously the difference between the positions of two people. According to the narrow definition of structure, the difference in position is the difference in structure. Then we look at the time relationship, if two people made an appointment to meet in the classroom at 8 o 'clock, and then by 8 o 'clock both people are in the classroom, scenario 1 occurs. But if one person comes to class on time and the other person is late, scenario 2 occurs at 8 o 'clock.

Therefore, the "same time" is a kind of structural relationship, "before" and "after" are the change in structural relationship. Because of the structural changes of matter, the spatial state of the world as a whole is different. When we compare the spatial states of these different worlds as a whole, we do not say that they are different worlds, but that they are different times of one world. Therefore, the time is the relationship between different spatial states of the world as a whole caused by structural changes in matter. Because structure determines function, the structural change of a clock is also the reference system for all other functional changes. This allows time to represent all structural and functional changes.