alt Hacker NewsOP 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.
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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.
Write one on the idea when "simulation of reality is more real than reality itself".
Reality computes laws of universe only till planck scale while the simulation futuristic humans created computes till (planck scale)^3
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?
> 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?
You just gained an extra podcast subscriber. Really looking forward to going through the back catalogue.
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?
I was grinning ear to ear reading this, laughed together with a co-worker. What a brilliant, beautiful, thought provoking, ridiculous genius of a comedy.
Thank you, I felt both my intelligent and comic parts of the brain were hanging out in a bar.