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.
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.
Thank you so much for the kind words—this made my day. Would it be alright if I quoted this on the website? It really captures what the podcast aims for.
Thank you for making this podcast, not just this post, but all of it. I now know how I will be participating in the creation of reality for the foreseeable future (at least as it applies to my local experience of it).
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].
Great piece! However, I think there's something you literally got "upside-down": AFAIK it's our head that ages slower than our feet, due to the face that it is moving faster.
Actually no. Gravity is slightly weaker at your head than at your feet (because it’s farther from Earth’s center). According to general relativity, clocks tick faster in weaker gravity. The effect of your head being higher up outweighs the fact that it’s moving slightly faster due to Earth’s rotation.
If you’re standing up, your head experiences more time than your feet, by about 6.2 nanoseconds per year. So your brain is slightly older than your toes.
So from what I understand from this theory, a smartphone carries more "temporal weight" than a simple molecule based on its assembly history.
Feels complementary to quantum emergence rather than contradictory. Maybe quantum correlations create the substrate for temporal experience, while assembly complexity determines how much temporal depth objects carry within that framework.
Both treat time as emergent from physical processes rather than fundamental, just at different scales.
Thank you! Although don’t go back too far, season one is admittedly a bit of a mess, conceptually ok in places but narratively scattered, but like a corporate handbook that's been photocopied too many times. Season two focuses on space (the big), quantum (the small), and space history (the old) and of course the corporate comedy.
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?
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.
This might be a really dumb question, but how do you use "temporal coordinate" in a sentence where you would use "when"? For example: "When I walked my dog ..."? :D
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.