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Temporal Order and Relational Structure in General Relativity
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.
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