Cautionary tales are one of the best things one can find in these discussions.

I wonder if the 195-IQ fellow has fallen into any "circular but pretty-looking reasoning" traps?

Thanks for the tip to see his site; still yet to explore it further.

I am aware that you are going to get lots of pattern overlap when you play with ideas; for example if you're dealing with the numbers 1,2,3,4, and 5 only; well there's a lot of potential for thinking there are similarities between diverse ideas using those numbers. Yet they might contain little in common but the numbers themselves.

Here's a quick idea:

You look up at the night sky.
Suddenly two stars appear close side by side.
Turns out they are supernovae.

Now although they look like they blew up in space at the same time, and near each other; turns out that its just a trick of perspective.

In fact one of them is ten million light years further away, and blew up ten million years before the near one. Perspective made them look like they were near each other in space and time.

Somebody else, millions of light years away from you and equidistant from both supernovae, would have waited ten million years between their explosions (if they lived that long).

Take a line from that person to you. The closer they move towards you along that line, the less disagreement you have with them on the apparant gap between the supernovae.

Now, how sure are you that they appeared "at once"? Well, they occured within one unit of your time-piece. They both went off between the clock struck x and the clock struck y; say WITHIN a one second gap.

Now, if that other observer in space came all the way to your planet and stood by you and referred to the same clock as you, he will agree with you on the apparant timing of the supernovae: WITHIN a one second gap.

It's as if the distance between you and that once distant observer has shrunk to just a tiny unit of distance on your watch.

Consider the situation where the other observer was light years from you and saw the supernovae as being a long way apart in space and time; (while they looked together from your view).

In this scenario, physicists say there is a constant pattern encoded in the difference between the two observers, and that's called proper-time.

They say what you see locally is "time", and relative.

But when the other observer visited you, he just collapsed his distance from you till it was effectively smaller than the distance say between two 120ths of a revolution on your watch, based on say a fraction of one revolution of the Earth.

So local relative "time" is just two proper-times which overlap. Dick says clocks measure proper time, not time; actually now I realise that "time" requires "units", and "a unit" is just the gap between two different "proper time" observing positions.