Scientists suggest that time, as we know it, may not be real

It’s something we’ve always believed we have very little of--time. Whether we’re up against a burning deadline at office or are taking in an idyllic riverside siesta, time always seems like it’s fleeting. Perhaps the key reason for this is simply because we cannot get any of it back--that inherent property of those clock hands constantly pressing forward.

The construct of time ‘flowing’ in only one direction is a basis on which much of science fiction is based on--that ability to magically freeze it, reverse it, play it forward faster than it happens, or jump to any point as you would clicking within a YouTube timeline bar. Recently researchers may have come up with an explanation on why we’ve never been able to treat time in as malleable a fashion as our imaginations dream of.

As science journalist Lee Billings writes in Scientific American, "Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity, or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our Universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward."

In other words, time doesn’t really factor into these proven mathematical representations of physical phenomena. Also, researchers have found that that these mathematical models apply irrespective of the ‘direction’ of time. For example in the case of a moon orbiting around its planet, its motion is predictable whether it is moving forward or backward: only the direction of motion would change.

Quantum mechanics vs Classical mechanics

Down the ages, in our quest to describe and quantify the world and universe around us, scientists and physicists like Newton, Maxwell and Einstein have come up with numerous laws aimed at reconciling the effects of the world around us. These classical mechanics have succeeded in explaining observable phenomena relating to ‘larger’ physical systems--from a feather drifting to the ground to the motion of planets around their suns.

But when it comes the infinitesimally smaller sub-atomic world, these classical explanations of physical phenomena fail to hold up.  That’s where the field of Quantum mechanics has emerged--a new set of laws aims at explaining the motion and behaviour of particles at this hyper-small level.

But there exists a threshold, a boundary, across which these two unique sets of laws have to transition. The point at which this happens is something that is governed by the universal force that holds things together--gravity. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is the formula that is accepted as the standard for predicting this transition, which incorporates the effect of gravity.

But interestingly, when physicists Dmitry Podolsky, from Harvard University, and Robert Lanza, head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine studied the result of gravity subjected to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, they found that the mathematics really doesn’t explain any ‘forward-moving’ characteristic of time. They discovered that the effect of gravity actually pans out much too slowly to account for the forward moving ‘arrow of time’.

Which leads us to another question: is time a real thing, or is it subjective? Taking it a step further, is it something that is manifested only in the mind of the observer? As Robert Lanza explains it, "Our paper shows that time doesn’t just exist 'out there' ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on the observer’s ability to preserve information about experienced events."

Which means that time isn’t something that already exists, ticking along a predetermined flow, but could instead be something that is manifested by the observer--you, me and everyone else.

And the question that really sums this up is: “Is it really possible to explain and quantify the concept of time without including observers in the system?”

Makes one think. Let’s spend some more time on it.