There are various axioms of experience that we carry into our physics, and yet have no basis there. This book explains that these all arise from our subjective time: a perception of an ever-progressing present moment. Relegating this, and the perceived phenomena arising from it, to the nature of consciousness clearly requires an explanation for how consciousness emerges, but it also allows a more self-consistent picture of reality to be formed. It identifies several such phenomena and explains the repercussions of them being excluded from both the fundamentality of the universe and our laws of physics.
Notions arising from a conscious perception of time include alternatives (chance, choice, volition, and associated probabilities), dynamical change (including all motion), and causality (including 'first cause' and mind-body causal dualism). The linking of these topics to consciousness is represented by one of two important principles arising from this work: the temporal anthropic principle (TAP[1]). It basically posits that subjective time and consciousness cannot be considered independently of each other because they are parts of the same thing.
An example of the insidious nature of such notions is causality. Although merely an empirical principle (that every effect has an antecedent cause) allowing us to make sense of dynamical change, it is a part of metholodological reductionism in science. Physics cannot define causation but science strives to deconstruct observed processes into known lower-level ones, ultimately reaching a point where the concept becomes artificial. Although mathematical physics may be considered objective in the sense of primarily describing relations between quantities, its interpretation, and explanations thereof, are invariably causal.
What is left in terms of physical access clearly demonstrates a logical pattern that physics and applied mathematics rely upon: symmetries and conservation laws. Although the block determinism inherent in any static block universe model goes without question, a mathematical determinism relating sequences of physical state may be debated, and the associated issues in quantum mechanics are considered in detail. The second of the core principles here is the determinate pattern conjecture (DPC[2]): basically that there are no singularities, discontinuities, or infinities in the universe.
An important topic in physics is the nature of measurement, not just in the context of quantum wave-function collapse but as a core mechanism allowing us to quantify and comprehend our environment. This work distinguishes two categories of measurement: 'comparative' — in which we observe some change (movement, displacement, duration) manifested in space and/or time — and 'causal' — in which we rely upon reproducible changes and laws of physics to quantify notional properties such as energy and momentum.
A consequence of a static block universe model is that an argument can be made for the origins of the core concepts of true and false. These have no basis in mathematics or logic, and must be accepted a priori since they are essential to all logical discourse, Boolean algebra, and mathematical derivation.
There is a brief mention in the work of a scheme by which space and time can be considered emergent (loosely described as 'threads'), but this is picked up again in the second book.
[1] TAP: Temporal Anthropic Principle: consciousness and subjective time cannot exist without each other, as they are bound as part of the same phenomenon.
[2] DPC: Determinate Pattern Conjecture: the state of the objective reality at any point has a strict and determinate relation to that either side of it in a direction we intuit as time. Furthermore, each state will be finite, and relations within a state or between states will be continuous. Hence, the pattern of change between states can be fully modelled by sets of consistent mathematical structures and axioms that are smooth, finite, deterministic, and continuous. The implication of this is that all measurable quantities in our subjective reality must be finite, non-random, and with no discontinuities or singularities.