People are wagging the dog and unfortunately they are not aware that they are doing that.

When cesium clocks are placed in space and display different times from cesium clocks on Earth, folks declared time to have dilated.

I'll use a tape measure as example to show how unintelligent that is.

A person is measured first at 6' and thirty years later at 5'11". The guy says: "I did not shrink; it was the tape measure that stretched, measuring less distance than before."

From this, one can see that the Cesium clock changed behavior. Time is the tool, and the subject matter is the cesium clock changing, exactly what Einstein predicted.

Tool: Tape Measure (measuring distance)

Subject: Person (changed height in 30 years)

Tool: Clock (measuring time)

Subject: Cesium (changed behavior when placed in different spatial setting).

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Einstein never got himself involved in time or space. Rather, just like Newton, his subject matter was the behavior of matter in space. The example of course Mercury's orbital precession. The subject matter is not time, and is not space.

So, while Einstein did his best to explain this, folks started to miss the point that the subject matter was matter itself. Instead, they started to believe that Spacetime was about the universe. It is not. Spacetime is a framework, a tool, to predict the behavior of matter.

Never ever does a tool change behavior. It would then be a lousy tool of course.