These days it is usually a mix of the theorists and the experimenters who validated it, science is more of a team effort these days as the mysteries get harder to crack. Unless it is for something narrow in scope but important technologically like the transistor or blue LED and then it was a team, and these things made a big difference. Inventing a better mouse trap will win the Nobel every time!
“Technology” is more accurately a broad discipline referred to as “the applied sciences”. Applied science is mostly a wonderful thing, and we all love engineers, don’t we? Oddly, tho, the applied sciences are almost never what we’re speaking of when we speak of “science”
Maybe I misunderstand … but isn’t duration persistence with a number attached?
Duration are more or less passive & active forms of ‘existence; notation & assignment of periodicity, reference context, and periods themselves would be functions of our hypothetical observer, depending as they do on relativistic considerations.
The only relativistic factor in our example space is distance; a sense of duration arises made to cover that distance - again, relative to the time required to reach other things in the space.
I’ve said virtually nothing about the observer because looking at dimensionality requires limiting ourselves to the operations of things in physical space (it all starts from a point, yes?). Bringing ‘mind’ into the scenario opens the door to speculation & imagination; it short-circuits the process of considering the unfoldment of the physical reality. We love to theorize, to the extreme that we’ll speculate wildly on the most specious notions…because it’s entertaining, and sometimes we feel smart doing it…sometimes, we’ll even try to overthrow a nation with it.
The unfoldment does reflect on & in consciousness as long as we view it as a thing in the space with everything else, and let it be governed only by those basic bodily tools were born with. At this level, close observation of how ‘the machine’ works is key.
This is why “time” (an unfortunate word-choice, much misunderstood) emerges before mass: its physical character is its presence, and the travel thru space to it emerges a sense of a period that passed on the way from Thing 1 to Thing 2 (how space & time get to dance so close together). Duration and persistence as such register as time pass
ing, which drags consciousness into the conversation whether it messes things up or not. “Time”, from the very beginning, is inherently relativistic, Greenwich be damned.
This is why “time” is such a bad keyword for the 4th dimension it requires a relativistic perceiver…and is specific to the perceiver; our modern understanding & use of time is so ingrained that we assume we understand it, even when we don’t - even when it’s being given a special usage in context (like my blathering). In the theoretical case, time as we understand it is an
end-product, not a fundamental characteristic of the physical universe.
Once consciousness comes into it, it sucks up all the air. “Time” is a non-definition, designed to stop difficult questions from arising.
Hope this dip into natural philosophy isn’t too turgid…maybe I’m not the only one who enjoyed it