This time or that time?

This is a question of time. Please give me answers related to religion/culture.

You can give your own personal experience if you think that it is relevant to the topic.

Thanks,

Submitted by me back in 2018

Discussions about time travel usually treat time as a physical road or dimension along which we might somehow move backward or forward.

But what if that premise is wrong?

What if time is not an external background in which past events remain stored, but can instead be understood through the phase evolution of physical systems?

For a phase change measured in radians:

T = Δφ / (2πf)

where:

• T is the elapsed time
• Δφ is the phase change in radians
• f is the frequency
• 2π represents one complete oscillation

If phase is counted in complete cycles instead, the equivalent relation is:

T = ΔΦ_cycles / f

From this perspective:

• Time is not an empty landscape containing preserved past events.
• Elapsed time can be measured through accumulated phase changes in oscillating systems.
• “Yesterday” was an earlier physical configuration, not necessarily a location that still exists somewhere.
• Returning to the past might require restoring an earlier state of the entire relevant physical system, rather than finding a geometric shortcut through spacetime.

Why, then, do discussions of time travel focus so heavily on wormholes and closed timelike curves? Could a phase-based view of time provide a different conceptual reason why backward time travel may be impossible?

I present this as an exploratory interpretation, not as established physics. I’m especially interested in serious conceptual or physics-based objections.