Maybe We Always Lack Time Because It Fundamentally Doesn't Exist?

Introduction

Time doesn't wait. We all feel this, but rarely think about why — or what time even means. Ordinary people lack the time to contemplate time itself, while some physicists have made this their life's work.

The Nature of "Now"

In everyday life, we divide time into three categories: past, present, and future. This division seems obvious until a deeper analysis reveals its fundamental problem. We need the present to distinguish past from future, yet what actually is the present?

Everything defined by time must have duration. We measure past events and estimate future durations. However, the present seems to have no duration at all — it's a point between past and future on a timeline. This is pure abstraction with zero length. Does this mean the present doesn't actually exist?

Yet humans experience a sensation of the present. Our minds create duration awareness so we can attribute reality to what we call "now."

Core principle: Time is essentially a measure of change. When everything remains unchanging, time becomes unnecessary.

Newton's Absolute Time

Isaac Newton defined what we call absolute time — time flowing uniformly, "like a full river, identical for all observers." In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein challenged this, claiming that such a representation of time is a crude approximation of what actually happens. Instead, time and duration depend on relative motion between observers.

Einstein's Relativity

The Simultaneity Problem: Two events that are simultaneous for observer A occur at different times for observer B, who is moving relative to A.

The Train Illustration: Standing on a station platform, observer A watches a passing train. When the train reaches its midpoint, lightning strikes both the front and the rear. Observer A measures light arrival times and concludes the strikes were simultaneous.

Observer B inside the moving train receives the front strike's light before the rear strike's light. Since light travels at constant speed while the train moves forward, the front lightning covers less distance and reaches observer B before the rear lightning, which must catch up to the moving train.

At normal train speeds, this difference is negligible — which is why we don't notice such effects daily. This explains why Newtonian absolute time works for everyday matters. But when speeds approach the velocity of light, the differences become observable. Laboratory experiments have repeatedly confirmed Einstein's special relativity.

General Relativity (1915)

Einstein didn't stop there. Ten years later, he published general relativity, showing that including accelerated motion requires rethinking gravity and spacetime itself. Einstein realized that gravity perfectly mimics acceleration — like experiencing weight changes in a fast elevator.

Gravitational Effect on Time: When gravitational attraction exists, escaping becomes increasingly difficult. Even light experiences these effects — not in speed, but in wave properties: it becomes stretched when trying to escape strong gravitational regions, like those near stars or black holes.

If light waves represent clocks (counting wave crests passing per second), then gravity reduces the number of passing crests. Stronger gravity means fewer crests counted. Therefore, gravity slows time.

Classical vs. Einstein's Universes

Both the Newtonian and Einsteinian pictures reveal little about time's true nature. Both present eternal "block" universes where time is a dimension unlike space, so everything exists simultaneously — not as instantaneous events, but as an unfolding drama on this stage.

Einstein's equations allow different observers to disagree about the duration of time intervals, but the spacetime continuum itself remains an unchanging stage.

In quantum mechanics, just as in Newton's and Einstein's theories, the physics laws governing the microscopic world look identical moving forward or backward through time. Even innovative theorists who treat time as an emergent phenomenon arising from more primitive, timeless states focus on what time does rather than how it feels. Time flow doesn't feature in modern physics theories.

The Consciousness Problem

For centuries, physicists regarded consciousness as something beyond physics — too complex. As scientists penetrated atoms and approached stars, self-awareness and the stark contrast between our time-flow experience and our eternal mathematical theories remained suspended.

Critical question: Doesn't science require checking itself against experience? This mismatch may explain why many students don't just fail to "understand" physics but actively reject it. Where are they in physicists' worldview? Where is life and death? Where is time's flow?

The Universe's Origin Problem

Everything becomes murkier when considering the universe's origin. The word itself implies a moment when the universe arose as we know it — essentially when time started ticking. This remains a mystery spawning deep conceptual difficulties.

If the universe itself contains all of spacetime, how can we speak of its evolution through time?

The Problem of Time in Modern Physics

The central conflict, called "the problem of time," emerges at the intersection of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics treats time flow as universal and absolute, while general relativity considers it pliable and relative. This problem raises core questions: What is time physically, and is it truly real as a separate phenomenon? Why does time seem to "flow" in one direction despite no known microscopic physics laws apparently requiring this?

Classical Mechanics Perspective: Time receives special status as a classical background parameter external to systems. This appears in the Copenhagen quantum interpretation: all observable measurements occur at specific time moments, with probabilities assigned only to such measurements.

General Relativity Perspective: Time isn't a unique background parameter but one coordinate, unlike spatial ones. General relativity's field equations don't use time as a parameter — instead they are formulated in spacetime terms. Many time-problem questions exist within general relativity alone.

The Wheeler-DeWitt Equation

A major breakthrough came in the 1960s: physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt successfully unified previously incompatible ideas in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, spawning canonical quantum gravity theory.

However, physicists quickly discovered that solving one problem created another. The new problem: time plays no role in this equation. Essentially, it claims nothing ever happens in the universe — explicitly contradicting observational data.

The Page and Wootters Solution (1983)

Theorists Don Page and William Wootters proposed a new solution based on quantum entanglement — a phenomenon where two quantum particles' properties depend on each other despite physical separation.

Page and Wootters showed how entanglement can measure time. Their idea: an entangled particle pair's evolution acts as clocks for measuring changes.

But the results depend on the method of observation. One approach: compare entangled particle changes with external clocks completely independent from the universe. In this case, Page and Wootters showed that particles appear completely unchanging — time doesn't exist in this scenario.

Another approach yields different results. Here, an observer inside the universe compares particle evolution with the rest of the universe's evolution. The internal observer sees changes, and this difference in entangled particle evolution compared to everything else becomes an important measure of time.

Key implication: This suggests that time is an emergent phenomenon arising from quantum entanglement properties. It exists only for observers inside the universe. Any outside observer sees a static, unchanging universe, exactly as the Wheeler-DeWitt equations predict.

Experimental Confirmation

Without experimental confirmation, Page and Wootters' ideas remained speculative — and observing the universe from outside is impossible. Confirmation seemed nearly impossible.

However, physicists conducted experiments studying photon behavior, showing that within their experimental setup, time truly is an emergent phenomenon for "internal" observers but absent for external ones.

The Toy Universe: It consisted of an entangled photon pair and an observer measuring their state in two ways. First, the observer measures system evolution, becoming entangled with it. Second, they measure evolution against external clocks completely independent from the toy universe.

Each entangled photon has polarization, changeable through special plates. In the first case, the observer measures one photon's polarization, becoming entangled with it, then compares it with the second photon's polarization. The difference becomes a measure of time.

In the second case, photons pass through polarization-changing plates again. But here, the observer measures only both photons' global properties, comparing them with independent clocks. In this case, the observer cannot detect photon differences. With no differences, nothing happened — the system appears static. In other words, no time emerges in the system.

Naturally, developing this experiment toward macroscopic scales — moving from photons to something more tangible — would be wonderful.

Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG)

Another theory attempting to reconcile general relativity with quantum physics is loop quantum gravity. Its unique approach quantizes both space and time. In its paradigm, space isn't continuous but consists of tiny, discrete Planck-sized units, around 10^-35 meters.

This quantization uses spin networks — quantum gravitational field states. These networks evolve temporally, creating "spin foam" that maps these quantum states' history. By treating space and time as granular, LQG provides common ground where quantum mechanics' probabilistic elements and general relativity's geometric nature can coexist simultaneously. Additionally, LQG solves singularity problems — points with infinite matter density.

LQG equations are background-independent, not relying on some pre-existing stage. Instead, they supposedly generate space and time at distances exceeding Planck length by about ten times. Gravitational interaction becomes simply one field among those shaping the world — this is the relational spacetime interpretation. Unfortunately, LQG carries unresolved difficulties; otherwise we'd be celebrating the "theory of everything" already.

Conclusion

The problem of time remains one of modern physics' most difficult challenges. Different time interpretations in general relativity and quantum mechanics remain unreconciled, hampering the creation of a unified "theory of everything." Possibly, solving this requires radically new approaches that reassess time's fundamental nature.

Studying time isn't just seeking answers to abstract questions — it's a journey toward reality's deepest foundations.