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.
qntmfred · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (Thoreau)
roywiggins · 3h ago
> 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 · 3h ago
How does that make any sense at all? "temporal experience"? "quantum beings"? "reality’s information processing systems"?
TMEHpodcast · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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!
koakuma-chan · 2h ago
I understand the post is supposed to be funny, but is the core premise that time emerges from quantum entanglement true?
TMEHpodcast · 2h ago
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.
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
So, from what I understood, they had a quantum system of two entangled photons, where one photon acted as a "clock", and the other photon acted as a "system". The quantum system had all possible states "encoded" in it and thus it was "frozen" (it didn't need to change because it already represented all possible states, makes sense). Measuring the clock photon would yield the value of time for the system photon, and changing the "measurement angle" (whatever that is) would yield value of different time (kind of like a cursor over values of `t`?).
It seems like it was just deliberately designed that way, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with our time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
TMEHpodcast · 3h ago
Great catch. You're absolutely right, that phrasing was misleading in a way that accidentally privileges consciousness over other physical processes.
komali2 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
> 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?
somenameforme · 1h ago
While this is a not directly an answer, I would emphasize that a lot of science still relies on what is essentially magic in areas that are not understood.
For instance the Big Bang Hypothesis largely came from observing that everything is moving away from everything else. So it's a very intuitive, even simple, hypothesis when you consider well what would happen if you just kept playing everything in reverse? The problem it turns out as we learned more is that a big bang, as we understood it, would not actually create what we see. For instance one problem, among many, is the Horizon Problem. [1]
Areas of the universe that should not be causally connected (light/causality itself, traveling obviously at the speed of light, would not have had time to go from one region to the other if it started at the birth of the universe seem to be causally connected, in that they're effectively homogeneous. So the currently standard explanation for this is cosmic inflation. [2]
Cosmic inflation suggests that for a brief moment in time, the universe's acceleration went into ultra over-drive expanding outward at many times the speed of light, only to suddenly slow down, and then resume accelerating again. This theory is 100% ad hoc. There is no rationale, logic, or remotely supported physical explanation - it's as good as magic for now. The only reason it became the standard is because it plugged a bunch of holes in the Big Bang Theory.
So too with consciousness, it's only in insisting in an answer that somebody is left waxing between the extremes of a basic emergent physical property with completely hamstrung ad hoc hypothesis to support it, or a God ordained proof to each person of their inner spirit. Its natural to seek answers to everything, but the reality is that we don't have those answers, and in some cases those answers may ultimately never be available. And while this may vary between people, I would much prefer to simply accept my own ignorance than believe in answers that have no more grounding than that opposite extreme which they seek to challenge.
One could argue for "emergent" dualism without arguing for an immortal soul, for example - the physical complexity collapses on death, so too does the emergent consciousness with it.
Property Dualism is probably the most palatable to materialists, especially non-reductive physicalism. Basically, the idea that mental properties are irreducible to physical ones 1:1, but may still map to physical reality. Or that all mental states may map to physical states, without mental states themselves being physical (the things itself not really "existing" outside of the qualitative experience of the conscious entity).
I know that to many materialists that just means that the physical state (of the brain or GPU vram) is the consciousness, but dualism is imo sort of like saying one thing can't be two things at the same time, at least when it comes to consciousness - the vram state is real and correlates to a conscious state, but the conscious state still exists non-physically.
I also understand that many of us don't want to think that consciousness is "something special" or have aversions to anthropocentric theories, but I believe we shouldn't completely write off the possibility that something really is special about consciousness until we solve it, or at least get anywhere close to solving it, which we evidently haven't done at all because we're not even theoretically sure of a good path to make an artificial version of consciousness. It's not like we lack the compute and are waiting for technology improvements, we just don't know how to do it.
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
So what you are saying is that consciousness is a property that emerges from a complex neural network that our brain is, and that makes sense. And indeed, in that case, consciousness would not be a physical thing since properties are not physical objects. But that would also mean that consciousness cannot invoke any quantum mechanics, which supports the original point that creating temporal experiences does not require a conscious being.
> we just don't know how to do it
As far as I know, there is no proof that consciousness exists, aside from the fact that everyone personally perceives it. In other words, one has no proof that another is conscious.
Claude effectively claims to be conscious, why should we not believe him?
roywiggins · 2h ago
If consciousness is immaterial it's probably not also quantum, so it's neither here nor there really.
chipsrafferty · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. And yes, in a closed system, time is durational.
bravesoul2 · 2h ago
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.
satisfice · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 2h ago
Time does exist though, at least directionally, because of entropy, no?
TMEHpodcast · 2h ago
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 · 3h ago
timecube does exist
labster · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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?"
m3kw9 · 3h ago
Our survival is tied to time because things change irreversibly and resources run out as t -> infinity.
rukuu001 · 2h ago
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
pharrington · 2h ago
"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
TMEHpodcast · 2h ago
Subtly but in this case it’s about Page-Wootters specifically
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.
It's like the difference between saying "temporal coordinate" versus "when", one sounds more scientific but they're pointing at the same thing.
“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.”
sure, but in exactly the same way rocks are embedded in reality's information-processing systems are creating temporal experiences (erosion, melting, etc)
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.
It seems like it was just deliberately designed that way, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with our time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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?
For instance the Big Bang Hypothesis largely came from observing that everything is moving away from everything else. So it's a very intuitive, even simple, hypothesis when you consider well what would happen if you just kept playing everything in reverse? The problem it turns out as we learned more is that a big bang, as we understood it, would not actually create what we see. For instance one problem, among many, is the Horizon Problem. [1]
Areas of the universe that should not be causally connected (light/causality itself, traveling obviously at the speed of light, would not have had time to go from one region to the other if it started at the birth of the universe seem to be causally connected, in that they're effectively homogeneous. So the currently standard explanation for this is cosmic inflation. [2]
Cosmic inflation suggests that for a brief moment in time, the universe's acceleration went into ultra over-drive expanding outward at many times the speed of light, only to suddenly slow down, and then resume accelerating again. This theory is 100% ad hoc. There is no rationale, logic, or remotely supported physical explanation - it's as good as magic for now. The only reason it became the standard is because it plugged a bunch of holes in the Big Bang Theory.
So too with consciousness, it's only in insisting in an answer that somebody is left waxing between the extremes of a basic emergent physical property with completely hamstrung ad hoc hypothesis to support it, or a God ordained proof to each person of their inner spirit. Its natural to seek answers to everything, but the reality is that we don't have those answers, and in some cases those answers may ultimately never be available. And while this may vary between people, I would much prefer to simply accept my own ignorance than believe in answers that have no more grounding than that opposite extreme which they seek to challenge.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation
Property Dualism is probably the most palatable to materialists, especially non-reductive physicalism. Basically, the idea that mental properties are irreducible to physical ones 1:1, but may still map to physical reality. Or that all mental states may map to physical states, without mental states themselves being physical (the things itself not really "existing" outside of the qualitative experience of the conscious entity).
I know that to many materialists that just means that the physical state (of the brain or GPU vram) is the consciousness, but dualism is imo sort of like saying one thing can't be two things at the same time, at least when it comes to consciousness - the vram state is real and correlates to a conscious state, but the conscious state still exists non-physically.
I also understand that many of us don't want to think that consciousness is "something special" or have aversions to anthropocentric theories, but I believe we shouldn't completely write off the possibility that something really is special about consciousness until we solve it, or at least get anywhere close to solving it, which we evidently haven't done at all because we're not even theoretically sure of a good path to make an artificial version of consciousness. It's not like we lack the compute and are waiting for technology improvements, we just don't know how to do it.
> we just don't know how to do it
As far as I know, there is no proof that consciousness exists, aside from the fact that everyone personally perceives it. In other words, one has no proof that another is conscious.
Claude effectively claims to be conscious, why should we not believe him?
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?
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.
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!
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