This seemed interesting to me because, well, what on earth would it do to your game physics to have varying time passage between ticks depending on your position in space? So I rigged up a simple simulation of 2 points connected by a spring force (a “body”), gave them an initial velocity, and set the tick to slow down linearly according to distance from a “center.”
The end result was that the body orbited around the center. The varying time passage meant that the spring force’s effect on the point masses would be reduced for the points in the slower tick speed. So it seems like you can create a kind of “gravity” by bending time but not space.
Here’s a link to the sim: https://pfrazee.github.io/gsim/
If space-time is packed together in most places, then it might resemble a grid to us. This model works in a lot of interesting ways too: wormholes are just links between two otherwise unconnected regions, the curvature of ST can vary depending on the region, and time can flow at varying rates depending on how "dense with time" an area is.
One thing I like about it is that Planck units kind of just represent a minimal distance between nodes (indeed, the connections between nodes defines "distance" and "duration") and everything else just falls out of the geometry of this ST graph.
Stephen Wolfram certainly did in A New Kind of Science:
https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physi...
And Louis Nielsen:
And probably many others.
Another idea would be to have the clocks running backwards.
Where can I learn more about this? It sounds interesting.
And the actual quantum phenomenon is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling