Managing time when time doesn't exist
42 comments
·June 25, 2025TMEHpodcast
HappMacDonald
I'm waiting for models that do a better job of making space an emergent property instead (or in addition to) time.
Distance and Locality seem to be the only real factors of space that have any bearing on QM or even GR, after all.
So what really even is this "distance" thing that seems to be so pervasive that it's fantastically easy to take for granted?
andsoitis
> emerges from more fundamental processes
What do you make of Assembly Theory’s reinterpretation of time as a physical property, closely linked to the complexity and history of objects?
qntmfred
you used the word instant quite a bit. and the word moment a few times. notably, to define what an instant is. was there any particular reason you didn't just use the term moment throughout?
TMEHpodcast
Probably subconscious. I tend to use "instant" when trying to sound more technical/physics-y and "moment" when being more conversational. If time is emergent, both words are describing the same phenomenon.
It's like the difference between saying "temporal coordinate" versus "when", one sounds more scientific but they're pointing at the same thing.
xivzgrev
New levels of guilt tripping unlocked!
“When you’re scrolling social media instead of working on important projects, you’re not just wasting time—you’re failing to fully participate in the quantum correlations that create temporal reality for yourself and others.”
wisemang
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (Thoreau)
roywiggins
> We’re not just experiencing time—we’re creating temporal experience through the very act of being conscious, quantum beings embedded in reality’s information processing systems.
sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)
koakuma-chan
How does that make any sense at all? "temporal experience"? "quantum beings"? "reality’s information processing systems"?
TMEHpodcast
Caveat, this is a blog post for a science comedy podcast.
The actual science is much simpler than that comedic explanation: recent experiments suggest time emerges from quantum entanglement between particles/systems. When quantum systems interact and become correlated, observers inside those systems experience what we call "time." External observers see the whole system as static and timeless.
But that's about measurement and observation in physics experiments - not about consciousness being special or rocks having "experiences" or the universe being some kind of cosmic computer.
pharrington
While I think I now understand what you're going for, remember that the overwhelming amount of people who will now read this don't have the scientific knowledge to understand your blog's sarcastic tone. I know I didn't have a clue that your post was a deliberate joke until reading your comments here!
TMEHpodcast
Great catch. You're absolutely right, that phrasing was misleading in a way that accidentally privileges consciousness over other physical processes.
komali2
Consciousness being a purely physical process comparable to rocks eroding from water or whatever is an unproven and still debated presumption.
Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.
koakuma-chan
> Note that taking the opposite point doesn't require arguing from religion, either.
And what would be a non-religious opposite point? The human brain seems to be pretty physical, unless each has some magic attached to it that enables consciousness?
roywiggins
If consciousness is immaterial it's probably not also quantum, so it's neither here nor there really.
dleeftink
Love this. Are you familiar with chronemics, or the study of the perception of time? I think this ties in greatly. The work from Achim Landwehr and Tobias Winnerling that contextualises historic (ana/meta) chronisms — how we relate and position ourselves between and across times — especially resonates [1].
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics
[1]: Landwehr, A., & Winnerling, T. (2019). Chronisms: on the past and future of the relation of times. Rethinking History, 23(4), 435-455.
netfortius
Carlo Rovelli - one of my favorite scientists alive - has a lot to say about this fascinating subject. Start with "The Order of Time", if you never read anything by him.
kazinator
> we’ve built entire industries around optimizing something that physicists increasingly suspect is just a really convincing illusion emerging from quantum entanglement.
We've also built entire industries around optimizing image and status signaling: even more flimsy abstractions.
chipsrafferty
This article is acting like it's profound, but it's profoundly obvious that time is durational. Waste of time to read this IMO
TMEHpodcast
This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. And yes, in a closed system, time is durational.
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bravesoul2
Of course we are cutting close to "god" debates to debate if time exists. It exists! Maybe it an emergent thing sure. But so is a soccer ball.
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satisfice
I didn't realize it was intended as comedy until I saw the advice that meetings should be scheduled in superposition until someone shows up to one of them and collapses the wave equation.
I guess that would mean that all the people headed to such meetings are ghost workers until the collapse confirms the reality of the workers who attend the winning meeting?
TMEHpodcast
Yes, in this quantum scheduling system, all the potential meeting attendees would exist in superposition, simultaneously traveling to Conference Room A, Conference Room B, and the Zoom link that nobody can find. Only when someone actually arrives and observes the meeting does the wave function collapse, confirming which reality we're all stuck in.
The "ghost workers" headed to the non-realized meetings don't disappear though - in many-worlds, they just continue existing in parallel branches where they're attending completely different meetings about completely different quarterly projections. Somewhere there's a universe where your 2 PM budget review became a 2 PM birthday party because Karen from Accounting collapsed the wave function by showing up with cake instead of spreadsheets.
jayrot
Time does exist though, at least directionally, because of entropy, no?
TMEHpodcast
Entropy definitely gives time a clear arrow/direction (why we remember past but not future), but entropy itself is statistical/emergent from many particles.
So we might have time's flow emerging from quantum correlations while time's direction remains real due to thermodynamic entropy. It's like asking if "up" exists, gravity creates real directional asymmetry even though "up" emerges from mass distributions.
Maybe time's arrow is real even if time's existence is emergent? Though honestly this is where my physics knowledge hits its limits!
b00flyd00f
timecube does exist
labster
Four simultaneous days in one 24 hour day really does help increase productivity. That’s where we get 4x programmers from. (10x programmers are a myth, as cubes only have 4 sides)
groby_b
This is a lovely discussion that is best answered with "well, if time doesn't exist, it doesn't really matter when your paycheck arrives, right?"
OP here. This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast, so the science is accurate but delivered with about 47% more workplace humour than you'd find in Physical Review Letters.
The core premise is based on real, cutting-edge physics research, though it's still an active area of debate.
The Page-Wootters mechanism (proposed in 1983, experimentally validated by Moreva et al. in 2013-2015) does show that time can emerge from quantum entanglement between subsystems. In their experiments, time exists for observers inside entangled quantum systems but not for external observers viewing the whole system.
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation really does lack a time parameter, creating what physicists call the "Problem of Time" in quantum gravity. And there is genuine convergence across string theory, loop quantum gravity, and causal set theory toward "emergent spacetime" models.
However, this doesn't mean time is "fake", it suggests time might be like temperature, which is real and measurable but emerges from more fundamental processes (molecular motion). The research indicates time could emerge from quantum information rather than being a fundamental dimension.
The 2023-2025 research I mentioned (cosmological time dilation measurements, atomic clock advances) is real, though the interpretation that "consciousness creates time" is more speculative than the underlying quantum mechanics. So yes, "emergent time" is a serious scientific hypothesis with experimental support, but science is still figuring out exactly what that means for our understanding of reality.