Mass as Temporal Capacity: An Ontological Foundation for the Local Generation of Time

Abstract

Recent work has proposed that physical time is locally generated by irreversible record formation, with temporal direction arising from the contraction of accessible future macrostates. While this framework successfully unifies time and entropy, it leaves open a foundational question: what physical property determines a system’s capacity to generate time at all? This paper argues that mass provides the missing ontological link. Mass is interpreted as temporal capacity—the physical ability of a system to support, stabilize, and store irreversible records. This interpretation complements Einstein’s mass–energy equivalence and provides a coherent account of why mass couples to time in both quantum and relativistic contexts. Apparent tensions between increased interaction rates in massive systems and relativistic time dilation are resolved by distinguishing intrinsic record-generating capacity from the rate at which accessible futures are realized along a worldline. The result is an ontological framework in which time, entropy, and mass form a unified structure, while the dynamical and statistical details remain the domain of a companion physical law.