In order to understand time it becomes necessary to ask if time is an objective or subjective medium. To be clear, by considering time subjectively I do not mean simply in terms of our subjective perception of time. The question asks if time is absolute, and thus events at different points in time persist in their own frame of reference with a constant relative position in time.

Basically, it asks if there are actual positions in and structure to time. The alternative, subjective time, deals with the concept of time as being functional, an operation upon the objective structure of matter and energy in space like the constant balancing of an equation in which there is no actual time, just a present state of the equation.

The purpose for asking this question is because the subjective version of time is one that can be reproduced. We have been doing this since the first human being recounted a story of events, and have refined the process of simulating and manipulating time in computer modeling.

The example that prompted this line of inquiry for me is a program called Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/) that models the universe in three-dimensions. The program allows the user to explore the three-dimensional universe, across vast distances down to the scale of a few meters.

It also allows the user to observe celestial motion at varying speed, moving forward or backward in time, in real time or at extreme acceleration. Observing this in action, one can get a real sense of time as a functional operation.

Within the scope of a program like Celestia, time is simply a variable in the program equation; it is the rate of change in the system. Inside of a system, an observer would be subject to the rate of change in the system, and would deduce that no process could occur at a rate exceeding the speed at which changes in the system are resolved.

It is actually important to note that an observer, subject to an environment in which actual time is dependent upon the process of change in the system, will only be confronted with the fully rendered product.

If the process of change is distributed, occurring at the most basic level of the system, then there will be instances where time will exhibit other subjective properties.

In the event that time is a distributed process, in a varied environment there will be regions where the level of detail is low and thus changes resolve in the optimum process time, but in regions of extremely high detail, where resolution is high density, the process will lag.

In a fluid system, the consequence would naturally be that a higher resolution transformation would require more time to process, thus time would appear to slow down in a dense environment. Thus, in such a universe, there would be a direct correspondence between information and mass.

The incidence of more information at a point in the system results in persistent lag, which is a subjective distortion of time. A mass of information would always exhibit characteristics of attenuated time.

In a process driven, information based universe, the consequences of particles with attenuated time characteristics would include attenuated spacial characteristics, in reference to all dynamic interactions.

The increase of information in any region would reduce the amount of change possible in that frame of reference. Any information coming into the region of density would become subject to the attenuation.

Each mass of information, having the tendency to attenuate time, would also attenuate space—specifically, to compensate for the processing debt created by an information mass, the scope of transformation around that mass would be reduced, conserving energy.

A natural consequence of this space-time dilation is of course the expansion of the universal frame of reference.