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Time as an emergent phenomenon of quantum entanglement

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Citta

Citta

Skepdick
Heya Nexians! I stumbled over an interesting article today that talks about an experiment confirming, or at least sincerely hinting at, that time emerges from quantum entanglement, i.e that time is an emergent phenomenon and not fundamental as many might think it is (or many here might perhaps not!). It's an interesting read, so put your teeth into it and maybe we'll have some nice philosophical ramblings from it.


Note to self: Articles like this may not reflect such complicated matters accurately, and phrasing stuff like this in layman terms is difficult and may naturally lead to misconceptions and oversimplification.
 
Good to see you around, Citta. And thanks for sharing this, if it doesn't trigger some debate, I don't know what would...

Gut feelings hardly play any part when discussing empiric science, but man, if there's ever been phenomena that I felt are hinting to an hyperdimensional reality, those are entanglement and emergence.

Time also feels like a measure of change from within the universe, and it's nice to see an experiment that agrees with that.

Now, to open fire... since we know we can alter our perception of time using intent/focus/meditation/psychedelics/etc., does this suggest we are partially departing our physical universe when doing so, observing it from the outside? And what does that say about consciousness as something that may transcend the physical universe, able to experience it both from within and from the outside, entangled and disentangled?
 
Vodsel I resonate with this idea of consciousness as a transcendent unit
Actually travelling beyond a boundary to an outside possibly timeless
State . It certainly can feel that way at times . I would not be surprised if some form of
Entanglement played a role . Perhaps to an outside observer our time bound universe
Would appear as a rushing river or like a linear stream of gravity .
 
I hope someone can explain what problem they're trying to solve here.

As far as I can tell, their argument is that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation doesn't contain a time parameter but as observers inside the universe, we experience time. They therefore conclude that time must be emergent, and then they try to show how it could emerge from quantum entanglement.

But general relativity already shows that we live in a block universe. So, if you could somehow step outside the universe then ofcourse time wouldn't exist. On the other hand, if you're inside the universe then why do you need quantum entanglement to measure time? Surely any old clock (or just photons) would do?
 
I hesitate to believe these things too much, as interesting as they are..I just get this feeling that our inability to deal with infinities, therefore resulting to ideas like "renormalization" etc, and finding other ways to make equations work without having infinites creates a block in our understanding..and it is likely our current physics will be surpassed by some more sophisticated models in the future. I could be wrong though. I am not a physicist just an armchair observer.
 
I think the idea of incorporating infinities into a newer working model is rather interesting! I honestly thought i was going to disagree @jamie when i noticed your skepticism but once again you blow my mind with some agile reasoning.

Also as another armchair observer it must be noted that (i assume) both of our understanding of what these mathematics express can be summed up to ± 0.

Anyone care to elaborate?

For instance, this quote:
"Entanglement is a deep and powerful link and Page and Wooters showed how it can be used to measure time."

Confusion arises here because i do not understand how entanglement can ever be used to measure time in the first place. And the article gets even weirder and more complicated hence-forth
 
"think the idea of incorporating infinities into a newer working model is rather interesting"

It is an ongoing debate between different groups opinions..the most interesting for me is in relation to the "infinite/free energy" of the vacuum. There is not really any way around it, and for some that poses a problem because of course you cant observe/measure infinity..hence the idea of "renormalization", which is kind of complex. It is interesting where we will end up in reguards to these ideas in the future.
 
Astronomical measurements of the cosmological constant show that the energy density of the vacuum is finite and close to zero. The problem is that when you try to calculate it using quantum field theory you get answers which don't match the measurement (zero, infinity, or finite but orders of magnitude larger than it should be).

The problem isn't that nature is infinite and our mathematics is finite. In fact, it's the other way around. Nature is probably finite and discrete in essence, but we are trying to model it using mathematics which is continuous (differential equations) i.e. the infinities are not inherent in nature but are an artifact of the mathematical formalism we're using.
 
My thoughts are the universe is finite , but only because it is a finite region of an infinite multiverse. free energy, like gravity is weak because it is a slice of infinity. but i've listened to enough pseudoscientists to make me believe that infinity can be expressed in a finite system. i can visualize this as a fractal image. as you travel through this image, all you need is TIME and SPACE to observe an infinite amount of fractal images.

As such, consciousness is the medium that has time and space. It is interesting that this article keeps mentioning an observer becoming entangled with a particle in order to measure time. It's like, without consciousness. Time has no meaning.

Also, upon reading the article once again. (i am geting a bit obsessive here) They mention measuring polarisation of entangled photons compared to another photon (which appear static). The difference is what they call time. It is actually change inside an entangled photon.

It seems to me, that what they are trying to do here is creating experimental data as an analogue for how a macroscopic "photon" like the universe appears to us as changing with time. I think the idea here is that the universe behaves just like an entangled photon.

So i guess their goal is not to show that time is in fact a property of the universe, but rather to suggest that quantum entanglement is the cause for time's existence. And ultimately another step towards merging quantum mechanics with general relativity.

As a last thought, because i'm running out of air here. And you have to excuse this mental crapshoot of a forum post from me, i am way in over my head. But i have been thinking about this for hours. Anyway, i think the universe is in a superposition state. Kind of a godlike multidimensional superobject which contains time and space as we know it as a single facet/entanglement of infinite dimensions.

My apologies if i stepped on any toes here with my amateur philosophical ramblings here, i hope you kind of understand my viewpoint and hope we can have more discussion because i am feeling rather inspired here :D
 
If spacetime is flat then the universe is infinite in size. And if spacetime is curved then the universe is at least 150 times bigger than the observable universe. The observable universe is 92 billion light years in diameter, so that means that the universe is at least 14 trillion light years in diameter!
 
I'm not sure I understand the result.

So, if you don't measure a system, you won't detect any time-dependence, but that doesn't mean the system is not internally evolving. If I substitute the word "interaction" for "entanglement", the result is that time results from interaction, or that time cannot be measured without interaction, which is obvious.

I don't know anything about the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, so I'm sure I don't understand the subtleties of why this result is significant.
 
Creo said:
Astronomical measurements of the cosmological constant show that the energy density of the vacuum is finite and close to zero. The problem is that when you try to calculate it using quantum field theory you get answers which don't match the measurement (zero, infinity, or finite but orders of magnitude larger than it should be).

The problem isn't that nature is infinite and our mathematics is finite. In fact, it's the other way around. Nature is probably finite and discrete in essence, but we are trying to model it using mathematics which is continuous (differential equations) i.e. the infinities are not inherent in nature but are an artifact of the mathematical formalism we're using.
Click to expand...

You can have a system who's parameters or boundries are finate, but which is infinite in it's expression and self replication without ever exceeding it's boundry. I suspect that this will be played out in our attempt to find a smallest particle, and that we will never be able to find such a thing..only smaller and smaller particles.
 
Regarding this research, I wouldn't be surprised by just about any discovery involving time because the nature of time (e.g.: why it is different from space) is so little understood. I like to think that time is illusory, but that perception comes mainly from psychedelics. For some reason, my impression from psychedelics is that the more I understand reality the less I understand physics; like I can see that the current state of physics is so far away from something that parallels the true nature of reality.

I suspect that this will be played out in our attempt to find a smallest particle, and that we will never be able to find such a thing..only smaller and smaller particles.
Click to expand...
I hope not.
As Feynman says, it would be very nice if there were 1 ultimate law of the universe, but it is just as likely that the laws of nature are like an onion with an infinite number of layers for us to uncover.
 
Infectedstyle said:
Anyway, i think the universe is in a superposition state. Kind of a godlike multidimensional superobject which contains time and space as we know it as a single facet/entanglement of infinite dimensions.
Click to expand...

AWESOME. I totally agree and feel I can actually conceive of this in my imagination.
 
Creo said:
5 Dimensional Nick said:
Creo said:
Nature is probably finite and discrete in essence
Click to expand...

Could you elaborate on why you think this? My intuition tells me the opposite.
Click to expand...

The Bekenstein Bound shows that a finite region of spacetime must contain a finite amount of information (measured in bits).
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WIKI QUOTE: "In physics, the Bekenstein bound is an upper limit on the entropy S, or information I, that can be contained within a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy—or conversely, the maximum amount of information required to perfectly describe a given physical system down to the quantum level.[1] It implies that the information of a physical system, or the information necessary to perfectly describe that system, must be finite if the region of space and the energy is finite"

So finite space must have a finite amount of information to describe it. How does this prove or point to the fact that space is finite?
 
If you do the arithmetic, you find that the information content of the universe is 10^120 bits. This is a large but finite number.
 
Creo said:
If you do the arithmetic, you find that the information content of the universe is 10^120 bits. This is a large but finite number.
Click to expand...

I don't think you answered 5DNick's question. You can do the math with a radius R according to the size of the currently observed universe, but how do you jump to the assumption that space in the universe is finite, with boundaries matching our current observations?

The fact the observable universe appears to have an R radius by no means implies the space of the universe is finite.
 
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