<layperson> If energy cannot be created nor altered, only change forms, then time seems to be quite arbitrary. Take money. Think of money as your economic ene

<layperson> If energy cannot be created nor altered, only change forms, then time seems to be quite arbitrary. Take money. Think of money as your economic energy. It can change from coins to bills to T-Notes. It can be dematerialized into an accounting entry or a whole lot of Satoshis but ultimately money is just your economic energy. To track it in your head, you timeline it - my employer/customer owned N units of money earlier, now it belongs to me as a banking entry, later I will convert it to bills to buy a goat etc etc. You may create all sorts of elaborate theories regarding money. There may be tight mathematical rules governing the transformation of money from dematerialized form to bills e.g., your ATM demands a PIN to do the transform which is completely arbitrary as far as money is concerned. All through these changes, money hasn't changed form at all. To tie it back to the original piece, energy is mass. Your electron waveform which we interpret as mass is energy. Once we started tracking it, we had elaborate rules (laws) to describe its behaviors but ultimately, it's just energy. While we are observing the energy, it behaves a certain way which follows all the rules of physics..but much like the ATM and PIN rule, the rule is not relevant to the energy. Likewise, your need to understand a before and after state for energy forces you to invent time. For example, if you never transformed your money in the bank into bills, as far as your bank account is concerned, no time has elapsed. </layperson>