The clock or the calendar is not truly required for you to be on time. According to a recent experiment conducted by a physicist, time emerges and changes by itself, regardless of the ticking hands or flipping pages. According to a study published on June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research, Giovanni Barontini, a physicist at the University of Birmingham, conducted the experiment with the aim of answering the age-old question of where time comes from.
The problem of time
How do we experience time?
Some theories suggest that the universe as a whole is static and that time shouldn’t exist at all. Barontini set out to look at this problem that physicists have puzzled over for nearly 60 years. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation, a central equation in quantum gravity, the field that seeks to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics, describes the universe as a whole system with no external time parameter. There is no cosmic clock ticking away outside the universe. So how do we experience time? Maybe because it all stems from the inside. Barontini hypothesised the idea that time isn’t really an ingredient of reality, but a result of how different things inside the universe interact with each other.To test how time could naturally appear without an outside clock, the physicist created his own mini-universe inside a lab. He used a Bose-Einstein condensate, a unique state of matter that only forms near absolute zero. In these extremely cold conditions, thousands of individual atoms slowed down to a near standstill and behaved as a single quantum “super particle”
Big Bang and Big Crunch
To create the mini universe, the physicist placed the condensate in a trap. He divided it down the middle with a thin sheet of laser light and observed only one half, which he called the “bright sector.” He ignored the other part, deliberately deciding not to see it. He noticed that the atoms naturally flowed back and forth across the barrier and occasionally spilt over the barrier. He called the moment they flooded the bright region, the Big Bang, and the Big Crunch, when they flowed back out.
Entropic time
Instead of using any external laboratory clock to track the experiment, he wanted to see if the mini-universe could keep track of its own time. He built an “entropic time” — a clock that measures the disorder or randomness in a system. In this case, it was defined by how much entropy was flowing between the two halves of the system. By tracking this internal change, the physicists could perfectly order the sequence of events without an outside clock.Barontini even saw time speed up, slow down and stop completely. When atoms were moving rapidly across the barrier, time “sped up”. When the flow slowed down, time “slowed down.” If the atoms stood still, time stood still. “Time was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping, depending on what the system was doing,” Barontini told Live Science.
An illusion is all?
It is an illusion that “emerges” from the internal interactions and changing disorder of matter.
He also found that both time itself and its one-way forward direction might stem from the same source, an observer choosing to ignore information. When he deliberately chose not to look at the dark region, Barontini gave up knowledge about that half of the system. This ignorance, measured as entropy, is precisely what created the flow of time in the observable half.Barontini’s experiment is the first to successfully generate and control a “sense of time” entirely from inside an isolated system. It proves that time is not necessarily a hard-coded rule of the cosmos. It is an illusion that “emerges” from the internal interactions and changing disorder of matter.