Managing time when time doesn't exist

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.

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.”

> 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)

We keep stressing about not having enough time, and then physicists come along and say, "Well, time might not even exist." It’s like carefully trying to organize a desk that isn’t actually there. Maybe focus is the only real resource.

It does make you wonder how much of our modern obsession with "productivity" is built on an assumed understanding of time that physics is now calling into question

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.

This article is acting like it's profound, but it's profoundly obvious that time is durational. Waste of time to read this IMO

> 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.

I've always had the idea that time didn't need to actually exist for me to perceive it, because even if everything happened at once from outside, my perception of time is based on how much has happened so far. It's weird to explain, but it's related to how I personally believe backwards time travel is fully impossible without some sort of "time travel epoch", to before which it would be impossible to travel. (Also, I am pretty sure a "time travel epoch" is impossible anyway, since you can't save nor restore the state of the universe.)

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.

Space also doesn't exist: https://open.substack.com/pub/sorhed/p/what-if-there-was-no-...

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?

Time does exist though, at least directionally, because of entropy, no?

timecube does exist

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?"

Our survival is tied to time because things change irreversibly and resources run out as t -> infinity.

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

"in the rigorous scientific sense where quantum gravity’s most fundamental equations contain absolutely no time variable whatsoever"

Immediate BS. Rigorous science doesn't have a model of quantum gravity, because they're trying to find one.

edit: did not know that this blog was sarcastic