Conceptio › Archive › PhilArchive
PhilArchive open access

Temporal Order and Relational Structure in General Relativity

Hearst, D.
PhilArchive · Papers
Open Source ↗
philosophy
General relativity provides a formally precise account of spacetime structure and temporal measurement while leaving open how its central notions are to be understood ontologically. Time is represented through proper time along worldlines, and temporal relations are encoded in the metric. Yet the formalism does not determine what constitutes the ordering of physical processes or how temporal intervals relate to the persistence and evolution of physical systems. This paper develops an interpretation in which spacetime geometry is understood as a relational constraint structure governing admissible physical transitions, and temporal order is identified with the ordered realisation of such transitions along trajectories. On this view, proper time measures the accumulation of transitions along a worldline, and temporal differences between trajectories arise from variation in the constraint conditions imposed by the metric. The account preserves the formal content of general relativity while providing a determinate interpretation of temporal ordering at the level of physical processes. It yields a unified reading of time dilation in terms of differential transition accumulation and clarifies the status of singularities by treating them as limits of the constraint structure in which coherent transition sequences are no longer defined. The proposal is intended as a minimal interpretative contribution that fixes what the formalism leaves open at the level of temporal ordering.
Conceptio Open Archive

Analyze & explore related research in Conceptio

Connect this record directly into your research workflow or AI agent. Explore citations across open repositories, query full text, and export structured proof bundles.

This document is indexed with metadata only: full text is not available in the archive for this record. Open the official source ↗

Related documents

Record · ID 204397
Retrieved via Conceptio: every document is proof-bundled with source, license, and retrieval metadata.
Bring this data into your agent: Connect via MCP or API · 20 free credits to start · no card required
Read the Docs → · View CLI source on GitHub · Conceptio Open Knowledge Archive