Time is a Cheeseburger

For the sake of analogy, let's say that time is a cheeseburger.

Now say I wanted to divide that cheeseburger up into it's smallest functional components. You might first start by separating it into all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun. Each of those could have it's own value of time: beef patty = three weeks, special sauce = four days, lettuce = nine minutes... Not very useful yet, so we need to keep going. Since this is a thought experiment, and super-powerful high-tech equipment is pretty cheap to think about, I'm going to purchase a nano-blender for our lab. We put the cheeseburger into the nano-blender, and out come atoms - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and whatever else is in there. Now, I know that technically atoms can be divided into electrons, protons, neutrons, and eventually even down to some hypothetical quarks that can travel backwards in time, but for the purposes of this thought experiment I am going to call the atom the smallest particle of time. It doesn't matter which kind; every atom equals one moment.

You can forget about the cheeseburger now. I can't really work my mind around the whole cheeseburger/time thing anyway, but I introduced the concept for two reasons.

1) I like cheese.
2) I wanted you to think about dividing time into chunks too small for us to observe.

Now, I would like you to imagine that time is a walnut tree, and not just because I like nuts. People who tend orchards have an interesting way of growing walnut trees. The type of walnut trees which grow the best nuts are vulnerable to blackline disease, which attacks the roots of the tree. To get around this, another type of walnut tree is planted which is hardier and not affected by the disease. The nuts of this tree are not so great, so when the tree reaches a certain height, branches of the tasty nut type of walnut tree are grafted onto the trunk. In time these grafted branches produce the yummy nuts those orchardeers are looking for. How is this like time? That single trunk of the walnut tree, the blackline resistant part represents the past. The past is a single line of moment-atoms strung together and forever frozen - like the frames on a roll of film. The yummy nut branches represent potential futures which are available to us, and the point of the grafting... This is now.