The past is gone.
Evidence of it is everywhere.
A crater can outlive the asteroid impact that produced it.
Light reaching a telescope can carry information about a star as it existed millions or billions of years ago.
Sedimentary rock can preserve vanished environments.
Gravitational waves can cross enormous distances carrying traces of colliding black holes or neutron stars.
DNA contains inherited consequences of biological history.
A scar can survive the injury that made it.
The event disappears.
Something about it remains.
That ordinary fact is the mystery at the center of Time Throws Fire.
Physics already describes change with extraordinary success.
Thermodynamics explains powerful asymmetries between ordinary macroscopic processes and their reverses.
Information theory describes correlations and the limits governing their transformation.
But another question sits between those achievements.
How does physical change become readable history?
The title is deliberately evocative.
It is not a proposal that time literally produces heat or acts as a new force.