If you freeze all atoms in the universe, does it essentially mean that you've stopped time?

JONATHAN DEVOR P.h.D. Astronomy, Harvard University (2008)

No.

You don’t need atoms to have time. In fact theoretical Cosmologists often discuss the space-time properties of various hypothesized universes, without any matter in them at all. Putting in matter just makes the equations much more messy…

Think about it like this. You can probably quite easily imagine a 2-dimentional universe as a curved sheet (i.e. a manifold), like the image seen below. You could place matter within the sheet, which will cause additional distortions, or you can simply choose to leave it empty with its “default” shape. To this you can add a third spacial dimension and/or a time dimension to your model. Doing this will make it much harder to imagine intuitively, but the mathematical techniques of general relativity, used to understand these universes, are essentially the same. So mass is very much an optional component you can choose to have or not, depending on what you’re trying to calculate.

ANAΔΗΜΟΣΙΕΥΣΗ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ QUORA 20/6/2017