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Fragments

Time is the medium of universal flux but is itself relational — there is no Newtonian container, only the ordered succession of changes. The famous river fragment (DK 12 / DK 91) is the canonical statement. The "Great Year" fragments imply a cyclical cosmology (DK 30: "this world-order, the same for all, no god nor man made, but it always was and is and will be — an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures") in which fire kindles and quenches in eternal cycles.

Fragments

Space is not thematised directly but is presupposed as the field within which change unfolds. Heraclitus is not a Newtonian; the unity-of-opposites passages and the relational character of all properties (DK 60, DK 61: "sea is the purest and foulest water — for fish drinkable and life-giving, for men undrinkable and lethal") suggest a thoroughly relational space rather than an empty container.

Fragments

Matter is what changes: water, earth, and fire interconvert in measured exchanges (DK 31, DK 90). The conservation principle is explicit — the measures (metra) of fire kindling and quenching are preserved — but matter has no enduring substance. The closest Heraclitus comes to a fundamental "stuff" is fire, and fire is precisely the element whose nature is to be in continual transformation.

Fragments

The observer is embodied, plural, and active, but most people are asleep — "the many are like sleepers, each turned away into a private world" (DK 89). The wise observer participates in the same logos that orders the cosmos. Knowledge is immediate (gained by attending to the world rightly) but most miss it: "though the Logos is common, most live as if they had a private understanding" (DK 2). The agency is active — the wise must rouse themselves — but the framework is cosmic, not personal-theistic.

Fragments

Fire is the most fundamental element and the closest pre-Socratic anticipation of an energy ontology — substantival, infinite, and conserved across its measured transformations. Energy is reversible at the cosmic scale (the eternal kindling/quenching cycle) while irreversible at the local scale of any particular thing.

Fragments

The logos is the closest Heraclitan concept to "information" — the rational pattern that holds across the universal flux, the same in the cosmos and in human reason. It is relational (intelligible only as the pattern of relations among changing things), conserved at the cosmic scale, and continuous. Personal information is *not* conserved — the wakeful self dies, dies again into the river, and there is no persistence of the empirical individual ("for souls it is death to become water, for water death to become earth," DK 36).