I keep coming back to the most annoying question in physics: what is time, before we dress it up with coordinates and clocks.

I just posted a short preprint that takes a weirdly minimal route a model where “time” is literally an epoch counter from discrete state updates on a 1-complex-dimensional generator space, and a simple phase-budget idea naturally pushes you toward a lock like Rω=c and something that looks like time dilation as a redistribution between internal rotation and external motion.