[S]tability of solids, the fossils and rocks... exist... essentially unchanged. ...[T]he configuration carries intrinsic semantic information... diff… - Julian Barbour

Ontological primacy should not be given to information but to things, as has always been the standpoint of realists.

He... explain[ed] how the astronomers... had to grapple with the problem of defining definition, because for 2 1/2 millennia there had been just one standard of time... the rotation of the earth. ...[T]hat had provided an incredibly accurate clock. It's... lost only a few hours in 2 1/2 thousand years. ...Very easy to use. Astronomers only... had to glance at the night sky, at the... Big Dipper... to tell the time within a minute or two... But in the 1890s a crisis developed when they found that using the earth... and... Newton's laws of motion and gravity... the Moon was speeding up. ...[T]hey thought ...the earth was slowing down because of the tidal effects of the moon... and... this would mean that the earth was not a good timekeeper at the accuracy that they wanted.

How do you define duration? What does it mean to say that a second today is the same as a second tomorrow? Newton in his... Principia... 1687, gave a... definition of absolute time, which he says flows uniformly without relation to anything external... [H]e says... if nothing... were to happen in the universe... if everything froze... time would still pass uniformly. ...[S]o ...time exists before anything else...