But here is the problem: in this model, time is treated as if it were a dimension of space. Mathematically, the metric signature distinguishes it — minus signs remind us that time is not quite like length. Yet ontologically, the slide is made: both space and time become coordinates of events, plotted on a manifold as if they are already there.
This produces the notorious “block universe” reading: past, present, and future all equally real, a static 4D geometry in which becoming is an illusion. Time disappears into extension.
From a relational perspective, this is a mistake. Succession is not a coordinate. It is the perspectival cut between potential and actual: the way possibilities become events. Space construes coexistence — how different potentials align simultaneously. Time construes succession — how one actualisation phases into the next.
General relativity works because it models the relational constraints among already-actualised events. The manifold gives us the geometry of what has been cut from potential into actuality. What it cannot model is the openness of what is not yet. “Now” is not a coordinate on a chart; it is the reflexive alignment of construal itself.
So the critique is not that general relativity is wrong. On the contrary: it is right within its scope. The problem comes when geometry is mistaken for ontology. Physics models the realised order of events; ontology must still account for the cut of succession itself.
That cut is time — not an axis in space, but the very difference between possibility and event.