[Dean Roddey]

Well, if we are actually going to be serious (perish the thought), the nature of time is not at all proven or fully understood in current physics. It may purely be a thermodynamic/statistical phenomenon, or it might not.

But, if it is, then of course that would make relativity a little hard to explain, since you can't warp a dimension that doesn't exist. In terms of relativity, time cannot be just a side effect of the processes of thermodynamics, since everyone experiences those the same in any frame of reference, it seems to me. In order for your to experience a different time from me, purely by parking yourself above a black hole and running the jets full blast for a week, that would tend to argue that it's not just our way of percieving the effects of the statistical activity of particles.

You could argue, well it just slows down those processes. But, if that's true, what regulates those processes that could be slowed down? If they always operated the same everywhere, you could kind of argue that it had nothing to do with time. But if you can slow them down and speed them up based on your rate of acceleration (or resistance to a very powerful gravitational field, which is the same thing), then clearly something is regulating their actions and that is being affected, which kind of has to mean it is some sort of separate entity.

If it is another dimension, as apposed to a perception, it's still very unique, since it appears to be a unidirectional one, but there's no way of knowing why that is at this point.

Anyway, the whole thing is really up in the air, as far as I can tell. Whoever even comes close to really answering that one will be assured of fame and fortune, at least as far as such things go in the geeky physics world. I'm sure that there are some physics groupies. Feynman seemed to do ok.