[dleviwing]

I find it amusing at times when someone will say that my views of time are purely classical and outdated, as if time were some style or fashion to keep up with the Jones'. Why would someone feel the need to view time as an entity, or as some mysterious phenomena of the universe?

Ah, I see; Einstein proved that time was not the immutable concept that Newton depicted it as being. Time is dependent on the state of the observers and their motions. I think someone has been confusing "space-time" and its mathematical geometry of space as being the replacement of time as viewed by us mere common mortals.

Einstein's space-time or 4D geometry (SR) injects a little subjective nature into our measurements of moving bodies. It is design to correct for such anomalies of motion that was originally mathematically presented by Lorenz transformations. Einstein's geometry of space-time corrects for the anomalies produced by our expanding universe, the measurement problem of being limited by the speed of light, and the physical motions of the observer and the observed.

Uniform motion, such as velocity, tends to limit the degree of motion freedom of an atomic structure or particles such to prevent what we would consider to be a normal rate of decay or change and thus it is interpreted as time dilation. To the bodies experiencing this motion, time would appear normal but, to an observer outside this frame of reference, the object is increasing its mass. Our ability to know its position in space is being affected by the interval of time it takes our signal to both reach the object and return. Obviously the rate of velocity that something is moving will have an enormous effect when at great velocities.

General Relativity simply takes SR and incorporates the anomalies of the influence of mass on the renditions of space-time geometry. Though many of the physical phenomena inferred by Relativity are indeed real physical changes, the interpretations of cause of these changes may be debatable.

[Guille]

I agree. In fact, I think of space hust in the same way as you do of time. It's a dimension, yes, but dimensions are not entities, not are entities dimensions. This is direct experience: as entity, I can be percieved as having such and such properties, but I cannot be seen as a scale, I can't be seen as an x with negative to positive form which to position entities. For I'm an entity myself! By this I mean that dimensions inhere entities in the properties they measure (spacetime measure these, but there is also the dimension of logicity, of artistic, of stupidness...), but most importantly that entities can't be viewed as dimension from which to position other entities, so I shouldn't see others from how I am in such and such aspect, for I'm not a scale but just another entity.

[baudrunner]

Obviously the rate of velocity that something is moving will have an enormous effect when at great velocities.

That's true. The difference is negligable until we pass the ninety percent of light speed mark when it starts to become truly significant. The effect is calculated to be a factor of seven when travelling at 99.9% light speed. In other words, a traveller taking off from earth travelling at that speed for a seven year round trip to and back from a point in space almost three and a half light years away as seen from our frame of reference will have actually aged only about one year overall.

Though many of the physical phenomena inferred by Relativity are indeed real physical changes, the interpretations of cause of these changes may be debatable.

The above example of travelling at 99% light speed is true for uniform motion at that speed, and this phenomenon is also observed in practical experience, where adjustments for time differential is necessary to a GPS satellite's internal clock to compensate for a) the weaker effect of gravity, and b) the high rate of uniform velocity of the satellite. These accommodations make possible even more accurate positioning of earth bound objects.

Understandably, acelleration must affect the ability of an object/particle to maintain conventional behaviour but any behavioural anomaly should then in any practical sense not be encountered at uniform velocity, which to the object/particle is merely another inertial frame of reference. Some other explanation is needed because obviously something is going on.