Perpetualism's Temporis

This essay introduces Temporis as Perpetualism’s ontological account of time by arguing that the longstanding “problem of time” in physics is not merely a failure of unification, but the result of a category error. Quantum mechanics, general relativity, and cosmology do not offer incomplete rival descriptions of one temporal object; rather, they each formalize distinct constraints of manifestation. Quantum mechanics articulates structured openness or potential, general relativity articulates actuality through irreversible relation, and cosmology articulates the large-scale coherence that makes occurrence possible at all. What physics has treated as contradiction is thus reinterpreted as differentiation. From this recognition, the essay distinguishes time from the moment. Time is not ontologically fundamental, but a downstream construct used to coordinate succession, duration, and order. The moment, by contrast, is the invariant site of manifestation itself: the irreducible triadic structure within which potential, actuality, and coherence co-arise whenever anything occurs. Temporis names the residue of this process under irreversible conditions, explaining past and future not as places where being resides, but as stabilized and unresolved consequences of manifestation. On this view, the disappearance, distortion, or fragmentation of time across physical theories is not paradoxical. It is expected once one recognizes that different theories operate at different constraints of the moment. The “problem of time” therefore dissolves not through a final equation, but through an ontological reorientation: time is secondary to occurrence, and the moment is irreducibly structured rather than singular. Temporis does not close the system, but provides a grammar for understanding why time behaves differently across domains while preserving coherence without reduction.