Philosophy (and physics) of time

It seems that time is a ficticious variable that we use to simplify the complex interelationships between changing things. A sort of abstract currency. Not my idea. Here is a quote from this recent article in Discovery:

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

I like the idea that things are interrelated in such a complex way that we invented this thing that ticks, to give us a reference. In architecture this is called a datum, the 0 elevation point, totally arbitrary, like the Earth being at the centre of the universe.

With computers we may be able to better manage the complex interelationships and understand them without the artificial variable "t". Strangely enough, most CPU's are slaves to their clocks, but some of the fancier ones have multiple, asynchronous clocks that run locally, both to save power and to be more efficient.

I have to go lie down now...