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+--- Thread: Article A quiet revolution in physics suggests time is not fundamental (/thread-19709.html)
A quiet revolution in physics suggests time is not fundamental - C C - Jan 30, 2026
https://theconversation.com/is-time-a-fundamental-part-of-reality-a-quiet-revolution-in-physics-suggests-not-273841
EXCERPTS: Einstein’s theory of relativity was, in fact, the first major blow to our everyday intuition about time. Time, Einstein showed, is not universal. It runs at different speeds depending on gravity and motion. [...] In quantum theory, time is not something the theory explains. It is simply assumed. The equations of quantum mechanics describe how systems evolve with respect to time, but time itself remains an external parameter, a background clock that sits outside the theory.
[...] Over the past few decades, a quiet but far-reaching revolution has taken place in physics. Information, once treated as an abstract bookkeeping tool used to track states or probabilities, has increasingly been recognised as a physical quantity in its own right, just like matter or radiation.
[...] Recently, we extended this informational perspective to time itself. Rather than treating time as a fundamental background parameter, we showed that temporal order emerges from irreversible information imprinting. In this view, time is not something added to physics by hand. It arises because information is written in physical processes and, under the known laws of thermodynamics and quantum physics, cannot be globally unwritten again. The idea is simple but far-reaching.
Every interaction, such as two particles crashing, writes information into the universe. These imprints accumulate. Because they cannot be erased, they define a natural ordering of events. Earlier states are those with fewer informational records. Later states are those with more.
Quantum equations do not prefer a direction of time, but the process of information spreading does. Once information has been spread out, there is no physical path back to a state in which it was localised. Temporal order is therefore anchored in this irreversibility, not in the equations themselves.
Time, in this view, is not something that exists independently of physical processes. It is the cumulative record of what has happened. Each interaction adds a new entry, and the arrow of time reflects the fact that this record only grows.
The future differs from the past because the universe contains more information about the past than it ever can about the future. This explains why time has a direction without relying on special, low-entropy initial conditions or purely statistical arguments. As long as interactions occur and information is irreversibly recorded, time advances.
Interestingly, this accumulated imprint of information may have observable consequences. At galactic scales, the residual information imprint behaves like an additional gravitational component, shaping how galaxies rotate without invoking new particles. Indeed, the unknown substance called dark matter was introduced to explain why galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than their visible mass alone would allow.
In the informational picture, this extra gravitational pull does not come from invisible dark matter, but from the fact that spacetime itself has recorded a long history of interactions. Regions that have accumulated more informational imprints respond more strongly to motion and curvature, effectively boosting their gravity. Stars orbit faster not because more mass is present, but because the spacetime they move through carries a heavier informational memory of past interactions.
But could we ever test this theory? Ideas about time are often accused of being philosophical rather than scientific. Because time is so deeply woven into how we describe change, it is easy to assume that any attempt to rethink it must remain abstract. An informational approach, however, makes concrete predictions and connects directly to systems we can observe, model and in some cases experimentally probe.
Black holes provide a natural testing ground... (MORE - missing details)
RE: A quiet revolution in physics suggests time is not fundamental - confused2 - Jan 31, 2026
Pi is an infinite series of numbers . if the complete works of Shakespeare don't occur between Pi[n] and Pi[m] they will assuredly occur some other place. Anything involving a circle (or Pi) should be massively heavy - and it isn't. So..?