#QuantumPhysics #NatureOfTime #ScienceAndSpirituality #ItFromBit #DreamBigger
“This study provides the first controlled experimental evidence that ‘time’ can be defined by changes within a system rather than as the external ‘ticking clock’ we think of as time. It offers new insight into the nature of time in quantum gravity that could be used to describe dynamics just as effectively as conventional time.” ~ Professor Giovanni Barontini, Professor of Physics
I wrote aerospace software for more than thirty years, and almost every system I worked on depended on one thing: a clock. Navigation, telemetry and flight control all assume that time ticks along steadily in the background. So when I heard that physicists had sealed atoms inside a tiny universe with no clock at all, and time showed up anyway, I paid attention.
In this video, Julia McCoy (speaking through her AI clone) starts with a striking experiment. At the University of Birmingham, Professor Giovanni Barontini cooled 24,000 atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero and split them into a region he could observe and one he couldn’t. With no outside clock allowed, the atoms’ own spreading, or entropy, put events in the right order. Time sped up when change sped up. When change stopped, time stopped.
From there, Julia moves down through the layers of reality: atoms, protons, quantum fields, and finally space and time themselves. She covers the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, from which time drops out completely. She explains Nima Arkani-Hamed’s amplituhedron, a geometric shape that predicts particle collisions without reference to space or time. And she describes Mark Van Raamsdonk’s finding that space comes apart when quantum entanglement is turned down. Each of these points to the same conclusion. Relationship and information come first. Space, time and matter are built from them.
Then she makes it personal. She connects John Wheeler’s phrase “It from Bit” to John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word,” and to the order of creation in Genesis. She tells the story of a year she spent bedridden, a year that produced nothing on the outside while everything changed on the inside. By the Birmingham definition, she says, it was the most time she ever made. She ends with two practices for anyone who has been shrinking their dreams to fit what seems realistic.
Julia is careful to say that these are models and early findings, not proof. Still, the direction the science is heading is hard to ignore, and the ideas are worth sitting with.
Key Takeaways
- Time can arise from change alone. In Barontini’s experiment, published in Physical Review Research, 24,000 ultracold atoms kept their own “entropic time” without any outside clock. It ran in one direction, ordered events correctly, and stopped when change stopped.
- The deepest equation for the universe has no time in it. In 1967, John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt wrote an equation describing the whole universe as one quantum system, and time disappeared from the math. Time may be what the universe looks like from the inside, as one part changes relative to another.
- Time may have a grain. A team in Rome calculated that if certain gravity-linked versions of quantum theory are correct, time carries a tiny built-in fuzziness that limits how precisely any clock could measure it. Grain is the kind of thing you find in something that was made.
- Space and time may come out of geometry. Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka’s amplituhedron is a many-sided geometric shape whose volume predicts how particles collide. It shrinks hundreds of pages of calculations to a single line and doesn’t sit anywhere in space or time.
- Space is stitched together by connection. When Mark Van Raamsdonk reduced the entanglement between two halves of a model universe, the space between them stretched, pinched and finally split apart. Connection comes first, and distance is built from it.
- Most of what you weigh is energy, not stuff. The three quarks in a proton make up only about 1% of its mass. The other 99% is the energy of the field holding them together.
- Information may be the floor of reality. Near the end of his life, Wheeler summed up his view as “It from Bit,” meaning that every particle, field, and even space and time get their existence from information.
- Ancient texts describe the same order. Julia points to John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the Word”), Hebrews 11:3, and the creation sequence in Genesis: word first, then relationship, then the solid world. Physics is digging through those same layers in reverse.
- Chase the field, not the ripples. Using the parable of the treasure hidden in a field (Matthew 13:44), Julia argues that particles come and go like ripples, while the field keeps producing them. The next client or paycheck is a ripple. Go after whatever produces them.
- Inner change counts as real time. The Greeks distinguished chronos (clock time) from kairos (the moment when everything converges). A year in which nothing changed inside you barely happened, and a single turning point can outweigh a decade.
- Your imagination sits upstream of your circumstances. If the solid world is the last layer to appear, the picture in your mind is closer to the foundation of reality than your bank balance.
- Write down the field-sized version of your dream. Look past the specific number or launch and name the deeper source that would keep producing those results.
- Guard what you let in. Romans 12:2 contrasts being pressed into the world’s mold from outside with being transformed from within by renewing your mind. If information really is the bottom layer, what you let into your mind may be the most physical decision you make all day.
