Moreover, it's pretty obvious that when they're describing the theory they can not avoid evoking temporal language & metaphors so it's difficult to take them seriously when even they can't avoid describing what's going on w/o referring to time.
Those rules might be be deterministic or there may be a roll of a dice. Then what we perceive as time is the sequence of states, the memory of previous states. No ticks are needed: there might be no central clock like in CPUs, each part of reality might apply those rules continously and move the global state from one state to another one.
But this is not physics as we are doing it now, it's presocratic philosophy. They got the idea of atoms right among a number of ones that turned on wrong.
I do agree that you can go quite far with calculus, linear algebra, and probability. But I do think that you overstate the case.
¹https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/eisenbudhar...
but time ticking because of some dynamic interaction mechanism between some things (like a mechanical clock) is very different than some fundamental/abstract/irreducible "time" which just is (like in einstein)
In a universe without states that evolve, you cannot create a clock.
>The more I learn about theoretical physics & physicists the more I'm convinced these people are basically idiot savants.
This is an incredibly bad faith thing to say, when you admit you know nothing about the relevant field.
Physics is hard math, and has been that way for a century. Simpler mechanisms of information description are no longer accurate and unambiguous enough to clearly define what we have the data to demonstrate.
But the public gets really really mad when you tell them "Sorry, you need 8 years of math education to ride this ride" because the public is mostly convinced that math is "useless". So people with adequate training in writing to a lay audience and zero physics training keep asking physicist questions, and the answer is in math nobody will understand, so they have to approximate what math they are trying to convey or describe with some shitty analogy or words that don't actually mean the same thing. The lay public then makes all it's inferences based on broken analogies and comes to outright wrong conclusions.
This is why the lay public is still convinced quantum is magic, or allows faster than light information transmission, or magically speeds up computation, even though the math has always been clear about how that's not what is meant.
Stop thinking that vague words a physicist says are actually meaningful. They are struggling to convey difficult but crystal clear math to an audience that can barely read at a 6th grade level.
There are even "physicists" who have taken frank advantage of this system to make money by lying to the public full stop. People like Michio Kaku. Some of them are nice enough to openly label themselves "futurists", but not all.