Managing time when time doesn't exist | Hacker News Reader

Managing time when time doesn't exist

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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.

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

Probably something like "In a strike of great coincidence, we both met because we went walking our dogs at the same temporal coordinate"

Thanks! I will be using it. :D

Are there any more examples besides "when" -> "temporal coordinate"?

Not at this moment.

> 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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Certainly, it's an honour to be quantum entangled into the timeless archives of the internet

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

You just gained an extra podcast subscriber. Really looking forward to going through the back catalogue.

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.

The first half threw me in a bit of despair and identity death, and the second half lifted me back up. Love this.

edit: feel free to include me in as one of the feedbacks.

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).

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.

Interesting, I didn't know about the time change due to gravity. Thank you for the explanation.

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.”

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (Thoreau)

> The real productivity crisis emerged when physicists tried merging Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics. They discovered something that would terrify any time management consultant: the Wheeler-DeWitt equation—quantum gravity’s fundamental mathematics—contains absolutely no time variable.

Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have been merged since 1928 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation That's the base of all the calculations inside the LHC and with some more technical details it has been tested in some cases with a lot of precision.

For General Relativity, we still don't have a good theory to merge it with Quantum Mechanics. The article cites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93DeWitt_equatio... but if you look at the equations it says

  g_μν dx^μ dx^ν = ...

  ... the Greek indices run over the values 1, 2, 3, 4 ...

The notation is confusing, but it's standard in the area. It means that "g" is a 4x4 matrix and "dx" is a 4 vector, and the labels of the coordinates are actually "t,x,y,z" something like [1]

                             ┌                      ┐  ┌    ┐   
                             │g_tt, g_tx, g_ty, g_tz│  │dx_t│   
  [dx_t, dx_x, dx_y, dx_z]   │g_xt, g_xx, g_xy, g_xz│  │dx_x│  =
                             │g_yt, g_yx, g_yy, g_yz│  │dx_y│   
                             │g_zt, g_zx, g_zy, g_zz│  │dx_z│   
                             └                      ┘  └    ┘

So it's a equation that has the time variable, just like the "Einstein’s block universe".

> The evidence keeps mounting from increasingly sophisticated timekeeping technology. Modern atomic clocks achieve accuracy where they’d only lose one second in 300 billion years—precision that makes your smartphone’s clock look like a sundial operated by someone with depth perception issues. These “tweezer clocks” combine atomic precision with quantum entanglement, revealing that time measurement itself has quantum foundations.

That just make no sense. Atomic clocks just measure the frequency of some process, some may use entanglement, but the clocks don't show that time is created by quantum entanglement.

> The Scientific Consensus: Time is a Group Hallucination

> What makes this development remarkable is unprecedented convergence across theoretical physics. String theory, loop quantum gravity, causal set theory, and emergent gravity models all independently conclude that time emerges from more fundamental quantum information structures. When rival physics theories actually agree on something, reality is definitely trying to communicate important information about its operational parameters.

There is no consensus about this.

[1] If you want too bee too technical, to label the index of dx you should use dx^t,... instead of dx_t,... They important part is that they are 4 numbers in a vector, but the _ or ^ have a slightly different technical meaning and there are some details in important for the calculations.

I made a significant error conflating different levels of the quantum gravity problem. Special relativity and quantum mechanics have indeed been successfully merged since the Dirac equation in 1928, forming quantum field theory that underlies all particle physics. That's well-established and experimentally validated.

The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is specifically an attempt to merge general relativity with quantum mechanics - quantum gravity - which remains unsolved. And you're correct that even the Wheeler-DeWitt equation does contain spacetime coordinates including time, as shown in your matrix breakdown.

The "timelessness" issue I was referring to is more subtle - it's about how when you try to quantize general relativity using the ADM formalism, you get a constraint equation (the Hamiltonian constraint) where the total Hamiltonian equals zero, leading to what looks like a "frozen" or timeless quantum state. But this is a technical issue in the formalism, not literally "no time variable exists."

I oversimplified this into "contains no time variable" which is just wrong, as you've demonstrated. The actual problem is much more nuanced and relates to how time evolution works in quantum gravity, not the absence of temporal coordinates.

>> That just make no sense. Atomic clocks just measure the frequency of some process, some may use entanglement, but the clocks don't show that time is created by quantum entanglement.

You're absolutely right - that's a complete logical leap that makes no sense. I conflated two separate things:

1. Atomic clocks are incredibly precise frequency measurements of atomic transitions 2. Some recent atomic clock experiments use quantum entanglement to enhance precision

But precise frequency measurement has nothing to do with proving time emerges from quantum entanglement. That's like saying "this really accurate thermometer proves temperature is created by the mercury inside it."

The fact that some atomic clocks use entanglement for better precision doesn't mean they're revealing that "time measurement has quantum foundations" in any deep sense about time's nature. They're just using quantum effects as a tool for more accurate measurement of whatever time actually is.

I was trying to connect recent atomic clock advances to the emergent time hypothesis, but there's no actual connection there. The clocks measure time precisely - they don't tell us anything about whether time is fundamental or emergent.

Thanks for keeping the physics accurate!

This is a science comedy podcast, so I’m hoping the 30K view I give my listeners on these topics encourage creative, but critical thought (sprinkled with humour).

> 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)

Great catch. You're absolutely right, that phrasing was misleading in a way that accidentally privileges consciousness over other physical processes.

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.

> 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?

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.

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?

> So what you are saying is that consciousness is a property that emerges from a complex neural network that our brain is

Sort of, minus the word "is" in "consciousness is..." since nobody, as you point out, can say what consciousness "is." Without some qualifier. "I hypothesize that..."

> But that would also mean that consciousness cannot invoke any quantum mechanics

Well, consciousness isn't known to be physical, yet does influence the physical world (probably), which is a major criticism of dualism from a materialist perspective - clearly, if it's influencing the material world, it's material! But, we don't know, so, no, it doesn't necessarily mean that consciousness can't invoke quantum mechanics if it's not physical.

> Claude effectively claims to be conscious, why should we not believe him?

I agree generally that we don't know enough about consciousness to "prove" it exists, but I disagree insomuch as I don't like to engage in cleanroom absolute theoretics about it - e.g., yeah I can't prove what consciousness is, but I accept that you're probably conscious, and that my friends I know in real life absolutely are, and Claude isn't because it's basically a Chinese Room. I don't have rigid theorics around this but I don't really believe anyone does, so I guess I'm just vibing about it for now.

My favorite read on the subject: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2756

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. 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 hypotheses 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

If consciousness is immaterial it's probably not also quantum, so it's neither here nor there really.

How does that make any sense at all? "temporal experience"? "quantum beings"? "reality’s information processing systems"?

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.

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!

I understand the post is supposed to be funny, but is the core premise that time emerges from quantum entanglement true?

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.

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?

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.

Somehow the Endangered Souffle trope seems to apply here… https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EndangeredSouffl...

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.

Focus assumes you have free will.

ADHD says I do not

or maybe it's learned helplessness?

i have adhd and can't stand these type victim mindset promoting comments.

Not to say I entirely lack learned helplessness, but not everybody with ADHD is the same. With my ADHD I can try to get out of bed and the body will refuse to move. I can try to get something done and I just won't be able to focus long enough for that to happen. Or, I'll do something useless like watching YouTube videos or scrolling Twitter and the entire time I will be screaming at myself trying to do the productive thing that I'm supposed to have been doing the whole time and it just won't happen. It doesn't feel like learned helplessness; I'm not deciding that things are hopeless "because of ADHD". In fact, the only reason I found out I had ADHD is because I posted about constantly being unable to do even things I know I enjoy and someone commented that it could be ADHD and I had apparently never heard of this aspect of that before. Turns out I definitely have ADHD.

Sorry you can't stand my comment. It's genuinely how I feel. I'm sorry if I haven't sufficiently conquered my mental disorder to your standards yet - maybe I should get off the Internet until I do?

It's cool if you don't feel the same way I do. I don't have that privilege yet. Maybe one day I will, but that's no reason I should wait to express myself. This is a genuine struggle I face and I'm not saying ADHD makes everyone helpless but it sure as hell makes me feel helpless.

Nothing about this invalidates any of our assumptions because time does, in fact, exist for us humans.

This sort of science is frustrating for me because we all know exactly what we mean when we reason about time together. Science saying, "time does not exist" doesn't do anything useful for us, because we already intuitively know this statement to be false conventionally.

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?"

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

This is a blog post for a science comedy podcast. And yes, in a closed system, time is durational.

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.)

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.

How much of this was AI generated? From the website favicon to the background, the animation on your mouse, the color scheming, the structure of the page, the writing content, the podcast voice, I dont believe any of this was written, recorded or even posted and made by an actual person that knows anything about what theyre talking about. Are the comments here even actually real? Am I going insane?

I had the same gut reaction and did a little poking around. It turns out that the voice IS AI. The author has a post on Reddit here saying that they're using Elevenlabs for the voice generation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TMEHpodcast/comments/1k4c8f2/an_imp...

> 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.

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

It made me think of my dreaming experience when I have a clock alarming every 5 minutes. After its first alarm, I had a complicated dream, feeling like 30 minutes had passed, but when I opened my eyes, the whole dream had only lasted 2 minutes.

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

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.

"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

Subtly but in this case it’s about Page-Wootters specifically

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

timecube does exist

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)

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

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!

Entropy gives us time's arrow (directionality), but modern physics suggests it's the observer-dependent growth of entanglement entropy specifically that generates our subjective experience of time's flow.

I get that its funny to shit on philosophers with the "time is a social construct" quip but you then literally outline the arguments that make this statement true.

The philosophers had their finger on the pulse decades ago, science only started listening after their models stopped being able to construct a clean deterministic view of the universe.

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

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