Time may be an illusion derived from quantum entanglement - The Brighter Side of News

Time may be an illusion derived from quantum entanglement<br>A new physics study suggests time may emerge from entanglement, challenging the idea that it exists independently.

Written By: Shy Cohen/<br>Edited By: Joshua Shavit

Published Jun 27, 2026 4:51 AM PDT

New study argues time may emerge from quantum entanglement rather than exist as a fundamental backdrop. (CREDIT: Shutterstock)

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Time has always seemed like the one thing physics could count on. Matter changes, stars die, particles flicker in and out, but time keeps moving. That assumption sits so deep in modern science that it often passes without notice. Now a new theoretical study argues that time may not exist in the way physicists have long treated it.

Instead, the work suggests time could emerge from quantum entanglement, the strange connection that links separate systems at the microscopic level. In this view, time is not a universal stage on which events unfold. It appears only when one quantum system is used to track another.

The paper, published in Physical Review A, revisits the Page and Wootters mechanism, a proposal first introduced in 1983. The idea has hovered for decades at the edges of debates over quantum gravity and the foundations of physics. By building an explicit model, the authors argue that the mechanism can recover both ordinary quantum motion and, in the right limit, the familiar time of classical physics.

That matters because physics still holds two incompatible pictures of time.

The evolving system phase space with the admitted orbits when cm≠0∀m and κ=3/4, r=2/3 for M=20 (on the left) or M=50 (on the right). (CREDIT: Physical Review A) In quantum mechanics, time is treated as an external parameter, something imposed from outside the system. It is the ruler used to measure change, but it is not itself an observable inside the theory. General relativity treats time very differently. There, time is woven into spacetime and can stretch or slow depending on gravity and motion.

“It seems there is a serious inconsistency in quantum theory. This is what we call the problem of time,” Alessandro Coppo of Italy’s National Research Council said.

Where time goes missing<br>The mismatch is more than a technical annoyance. It blocks one of physics’ biggest goals, a theory that can connect the microscopic world of quantum mechanics with the large-scale structure of the universe described by relativity.

The Page and Wootters approach starts with a radical step. It assumes the universe as a whole can sit in a timeless quantum state. Nothing evolves globally. There is no master clock ticking in the background.

What looks like motion appears only inside that frozen whole, through correlations between subsystems. One part serves as a clock, the other is the system whose change gets tracked. If the two are entangled in the right way, the second system appears to evolve relative to the first.

Without that internal relationship, there is no time in any meaningful sense, only a static quantum state.

Graphical representation of the marginal probability distribution related to |β|2 w.r.t the space-time coordinates and b) its section at any constant time for the example with κ = 3/4 introduced in the main text. (CREDIT: Physical Review A) To test the idea in a concrete setting, the authors modeled two noninteracting but entangled systems. One was a harmonic oscillator, a standard physics model for an object that vibrates or swings back and forth. The other was a magnetic spin system that acted as the clock.

The oscillator’s evolution did not come from an outside time variable. It came from its entangled relationship with the clock system. Under those conditions, the dynamics matched the Schrödinger equation, the central equation of quantum mechanics.

That is the heart of the claim. Time, in this picture, is not fundamental. It is relational.

A clock that must earn the job<br>The paper also found limits on when that picture works.

In the fully quantum version of the model, the clock could only track part of the oscillator’s possible behavior. Because the clock system had a finite structure, it could not label the oscillator’s full infinite range of states. That meant not every quantum clock is good enough to generate the kind of time physics usually assumes.

This turned out to be a key point. For the mechanism to recover ordinary dynamics, the clock has to approach a classical limit. In the model, that meant making the magnetic clock large enough that its behavior could be described more like a classical object than a sharply quantum one.

The study found that once the clock became macroscopic, the usual time parameter of the Schrödinger equation emerged more naturally. The same framework also identified a second parameter tied to the energy of the evolving system.

The evolving system phase-space with the admitted orbits when cm= 0∀m and κ...