This thread has so far been somewhat of a disaster. I give it a grade of D+.
The OP, rajnz00, pretends to quote Lee Smolin and Sean Carrol, but then spends two dozen back-and-forth replies with people arguing about conservative, obvious aspects of Special Relativity.
rajnz00 accuses a forum member of being simplistic, unscientific, and abysmally wrong.
... wherein he proceeds to use simplistic, unscientific, and abysmally wrong concepts himself:
I am totally flabbergasted by your statement. The passing of time is a reality, according to Merriam-Webster, if it occurs in fact and is not imagined. Do you think the only reason you age is because of that blasted calendar you hang on your wall? What about your dog who can’t read it? If you took the calendar off, would the fossil evidence of past life disappear? the dinosaurs? the birth of the solar system? the big bang? All caused by your calendar and watch?
In addition to its other flaws, perhaps the most egregious is that Lee Smolin absolutely never makes this argument in his book (or any of his books). This faux argument about calendars and aging. I predict that if I continued as a lurker, rajnz00 would do something contemptuous... hoisting your own personal opinions onto a forum, that happen to draw the same conclusion as Lee Smolin, and then attribute your opinions to Smolin.
Has rajnz00 actually read Smolin? For the record, Dave O's conceptions of time are actually closest to what the vast majority of physics professors actually believe. For a person claiming to have read Smolin, this should have been obvious. I do believe, that in the very jacket-cover of the book, Smolin admits that (the vast majority) of his colleagues adopt a non-cognitivist ontology of time. Physicists believe that General Relativity is more than a computing device. They think the theory exposes a deep metaphysical reality about the world, and for-that-reason conceive of the universe as a "Block World" ; a frozen 4D shape. Dave O provided insightful diagrams of what this looks like. A moving ball is a smeared out snake in spacetime.
For emphasis: Smolin quite openly admits that the vast majority of his colleagues are Block-Worlders. Instead of recognizing this smoothly and calmly, rajnz00 has responded to all such posts with vitriol and hostility.
If you still aren't convinced of my D+ grade, I will point out a sin of omission: Thermodynamics has been mentioned exactly zero times in this entire thread. The omission of thermo here is why also the mods of this forum have moved it into the Metaphysics section. A move which rajnz00 invoked bellyache .
I am totally flabbergasted by your statement. The passing of time is a reality, according to Merriam-Webster, if it occurs in fact and is not imagined. Do you think the only reason you age is because of that blasted calendar you hang on your wall? What about your dog who can’t read it? If you took the calendar off, would the fossil evidence of past life disappear? the dinosaurs? the birth of the solar system? the big bang? All caused by your calendar and watch?
I'm quoting that twice. Because now I'm going to respond to its content.
If rajnz00 defines the word "time" to mean "..the process of people being born, people aging, and death at the ends of our lives". If that is how the word "time" is
defined, then time is obviously real. No one could doubt such ironclad logic.
On the other hand ---
If rajnz00 believes that the aging of the human body is somehow written inexorably into the foundational laws of physics itself : well then, he's in a for a big, terrible surprise.