Feb 07, 2026
3 min read
If certain theories are correct, time could not flow: all moments would exist and we would only pass an already perfect history.
Physicists believe that time is an illusion and are trying to prove it
February 6, 2026 We all look at the clock. Sometimes with anxiety, sometimes out of routine, but always with confidence that time flows like a river from the past into the future, moving inexorably forward. Or at least that's how we feel. Yet in theoretical physics and the philosophy of physics, what seems certain to us seems to not exist: what if this flow were nothing more than an illusion?
For decades – and even centuries – scientists and philosophers, from Aristotle to St. Augustine, have tried to unravel the true nature of time.What they've discovered - or rather, what they haven't yet been able to explain - suggests that time may not be quite what we think.
"Time is an inconsistent element," Nicole Yunger Halpern, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, told New Scientist."Time seems more like a component of a theory that we hand in than a natural property."
Three irreconcilable versions of physics
For physicists, time is a problem that emerges in at least three versions that are difficult to reconcile.In fact, modern physics provides a disturbing picture of its true nature.
First, there is the so-called coordinate time: in many equations that describe physical phenomena - from the motion of a tennis ball to the decay of atomic nuclei - time appears as a mathematical parameter, a numerical coordinate that allows us to express the occurrence of an event.In this framework, time is not seen as something that flows, but as a parameter that allows changes to be ordered.
Then came the age of relativity.Albert Einstein further complicated the picture by showing that the "now" is not universal.
And finally, there is thermodynamic time, perhaps the only clear indication that time only moves in one direction.This arrow of time comes from the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy, which describes the degree of disorder in a system, increases.Glass that falls to the ground therefore shatters and smoke is dispersed into the air, but the two processes are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that none of these interpretations match our experience of time, or each other.It's even worse: many of the most important comparisons work as well in the foreground as they do in the background.There is no arrow in the numbers that points to the future.
For some thinkers, such as the philosopher Adrian Bardon, what we see as "the passage of time" is nothing more than the story we tell ourselves.As explained in Vice, the brain constructs a timeline to give coherence to an event and, as with color, we confuse this construct with the material of the external world.
Relativity reinforces this assumption: events that occur simultaneously to one observer may not occur simultaneously to another.As Vice points out, this theory destroys the “last safe haven” of our temporal intuition.There is no universal “now” but rather a network of events distributed in space-time.The past, present and future coexist in a certain sense.According to this view, the difference between them would be nothing more than an illusion, albeit a persistently convincing one.
The quantum paradox: time cannot be measured
But physics goes further. Quantum theory poses another difficulty: In the quantum world, there is no direct way to measure time as there are other physical properties. As Yunger Halpern explains, “You can measure where a particle is, but you can never measure when it is.”In this framework, the scientist said, time is no longer a natural property of quantum systems, but rather a parameter that we enter manually to describe them.
This paradox has led some physicists to ask a radical question: What if time is not fundamental, but emerges from a deeper structure that we do not yet understand?
In 1983, physicists Don Page and William Wootters proposed a bold answer.They envisioned the universe as a gigantic quantum wave function that itself does not tick or change: it is timeless.But by splitting this structure into two parts—one that describes all observable matter, and another that acts as an "internal clock"—the quantum entanglement between the two would allow the appearance of time to emerge.According to this idea, by reading the clock, we select (or set) the correlated state of the rest of the system at that "moment".Time therefore appears as an effect of entanglement.
An analogy quoted by New Scientist helps to visualize this idea: think of a manuscript resting on board, where the beginning, the middle and the end already exist at the same time.However, for the story to make sense, we must read its pages in order.The numbering links scenes that, in fact, remain stable.According to a Page a Wootters proposal, something similar could happen with the universe: the change would not necessarily be in the story itself, but in the way we go through it.
At the time, the idea was interesting, but it was far from any experimental proof.For decades, there was little more than delicate theoretical practice.However, in 2024, physicist Paola Verrucchi, from the Italian National Research Council, led the spring.
From the outside, the complex remained stable.But, in the case of the internal clock, the spring appeared to be stretched and contracted in temporal order.Most surprisingly, this behavior persists even when the system is scaled up, indicating that the illusion of time may not be limited to the quantum world.
Black holes as the cosmic clock of the universe
Another surprising finding from this research is that measuring time generates entropy.In other words, clocks – even simple clocks – don't just record time: they also generate heat.
According to New Scientist, Markus Huber of the Technical University of Vienna and Natalia Ares of the University of Oxford investigate what happens when we take the clock down to its most fundamental quantum level.The result describes a trade-off: the better and more frequently it moves (the more temporal information is tried), the more entropy it produces.Even a nearly perfect clock becomes unstable when you try to extract the information.
All of this raises an intriguing possibility: What if the sense that time moves forward depends not on its existence as something fundamental, but on our interaction with the systems we use to measure it?
So let's go back to the Page-Wootters model clock.Verrucchi and his colleague Alessandro Coppo suggested that the universe may already have natural clocks: black holes.They are very powerful systems that are isolated because nothing can escape what is happening, and, as Stephen Hawking has shown, they can be connected to the outside world through the radiation they emit.Verrucchi and Coppo show that they work like astronomical clocks. If so, its "setting" should leave traces in the entropy of this radiation.Can black holes play a role in the quantum clock of the universe?
For Verrucchi the key may lie in something more important than entropy: scale.A quantum particle can exist in many states until we measure it.That skin is irreversible.Once measured, there is no going back."The arrow of time," he told New Scientist, "may be a record of what has been measured."
So, we don't just take time.Perhaps we believe after seeing.In Verrucci's words, "You make time when you ask what time is."
Are we living in a temporary illusion?
This view does not remove the meaning of our temporal experience.The experience is true, as Bardon points out;We attribute metaphysics not to be done.Your life is still a series of choices and memories, but that series resides in you, not in an independently moving world.
If, as Bardon suggests, the passage of time is a kind of cognitive construct, it might change the way we experience the urgency of deadlines, deal with loss, or feel that time has taken something from us.Perhaps the arrow of time does not pass through us: we are the ones moving forward, creating memories as we move through the world.
Future experiments may feel that this is a body.Balls, truth is the best of philosophy, and mechanics is the best at the same time.We're thinking that's not a thing.
Perhaps time is only real in various senses: as an experience, as an increase in entropy, as a cognitive illusion, or as an effect of how we interpret the world.For now, time still exists, at least for us, defining every second.
