I brought up the subject of time and motion with my ten year old son the other day. When asked if time would stop if all motion everywhere stopped, he replied that such a situation would be like a photograph.
There's no time in a photograph. A photograph may fade and crumble, but the image as such is static. The only reason it changes is that things keep on moving in the world we live in. Chemical processes continue. Photons zip across space. Everything is in motion. But should all of this stop, we too would become like a photograph. There would be no changes of any kind.
However, if so much as one thing started moving, the enchantment would be broken. Once there's motion, time starts up again. Things that aren't moving have merely stopped moving. They are not without time.
Some may object to this and say that time continues even when all things have stopped. However, this would require some sort of meta-verse clock that keeps on ticking when all things in the universe have stopped. Time would have to be something that exists outside of the universe, and to introduce such a concept is to introduce mysticism.
To illustrate this, let us for a moment consider time to be a meta-verse thing. Would we be able to detect a situation where everything stopped in the universe, but time continued to flow in the meta-verse?
The answer is no. Even if the universe was stopped for eons according to the meta-verse clock. Things would simply revert to normal once we let things start moving again. No-one in the universe would be able to detect the meta-verse glitch. It might as well not have happened. The existence or non-existence of a meta-verse clock is irrelevant to our perception of the universe.
The only way we ever detect time is through motion. Hence, time is relative motion. There's no other way to detect it. We measure it relative to something else. We look for things that move at a steady pace, and we use these as clocks. Should all things stop so that there's no motion and no change of any kind, time ceases to exist, and it will only reappear once motion starts up again.
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