NEW

SCIENTIST
ESSENTIAL
T
HERE is nothing quite so remarkable and yet
completely mundane as time. In our daily lives,
we are swept along by its steady, unrelenting
current, but our emotions can make it seem to

GUIDE slow down or speed up. When we study it, we

find it isn’t the steady tick of a universal clock, but
something woven into the fabric of the universe. It can

TIME squeeze and stretch and its perceived direction, which

we take as a given, isn’t easily explained.
This latest New Scientist Essential Guide aims to
capture the mysterious essence of time in all its guises.
These range from the malleable time in Albert
Einstein’s relativity through to the strange treatment of
time in quantum mechanics. On the way, we grapple
with what time really is, how we measure it and explain
the mystery of the origin of time’s arrow. We will
unravel how our bodies perceive time, and dance to its
tune, but also ask whether time may only exist as a
construct of the brain. There will even be a trip through
the almost inconceivable scales of deep time. I hope
you have the time of your life exploring these pages.
All titles in the Essential Guide series can be bought
by visiting [Link], and feedback
is welcome at essentialguides@[Link].
Abigail Beall

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Abigail Beall is a features editor at New Scientist and author of The Art of Urban
Astronomy. You can find her on X (formerly Twitter) @abbybeall

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New Scientist Essential Guide | Time | 1

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3

THE BASICS THE ARROW MEASURING

OF TIME OF TIME TIME

We used to think time was the ticking The way we experience the world Ever since the pendulum clocks of the
of a clock somewhere outside the suggests we are just passengers 17th century, the hunt has been on for
universe. But this appealing, intuitive on a journey being swept along by the ever more precise timepieces – a quest
idea of an absolute time has been torn unstoppable flow of time. The big that continues to this day.
apart… time and time again. question is why does time only flow in
one direction? p.36 Clocks and entropy
p. 6 What is time? p.40 Timekeeping: A timeline
p. 9 An introduction to entropy p.20 Time’s arrow p.41 The incredibly slow race
p. 9 Relative time p.23 What is entropy? to reinvent time
p.11 Time dilation p.24 The second law p.43 Atomic clocks and beyond
p.12 Testing time dilation p.25 Cause and effect p.46 INTERVIEW: Jun Ye on the
usefulness of the world’s most
p.13 Cosmological time dilation p.26 INTERVIEW: Neil Turok on the
accurate clock
p.14 The block universe case for a parallel universe
going backwards in time p.48 ESSAY: Can we build a clock
p.15 ESSAY: How did it all begin? that is entirely quantum?
p.29 Time travel
p.30 Time loops
p.31 When time runs backwards:
what thermodynamics teaches
us about life

2 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6

PERCEIVING QUANTUM DEEP

TIME TIME TIME

The way we experience time is In quantum mechanics, time both It is easy to become stuck in
almost as mysterious as the essence does and doesn’t have an arrow. short-term thinking, but by
of time itself, leading some to suggest How it manages this paradox is just considering deep time – the vast
that we may even create the arrow of one of many puzzles we must solve to timescales involved in the history
time in our brain. achieve one of the biggest goals of and future of the universe – we can
modern physics. gain a much needed perspective on
p.54 The body’s metronomes our own place in this epic story.
p.56 How do animals sense time? p.68 Quantum weirdness
p.57 Do our brains create time’s arrow? p.71 Cause and effect in the p.84 The beginning of time
p.60 Resynching your body clock quantum realm p.86 The age of everything
p.61 Living without time p.73 ESSAY: Stephen Hawking’s p.88 A time traveller’s guide to Earth
final theorem
p.62 ESSAY: The tribe that has no time p.93 How to take the long view
p.77 Time crystals
p.64 Language and time p.96 Will time end?
p.78 ESSAY: How time could
unite physics

New Scientist Essential Guide | Time | 3

CHAPTER 1

4 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

We used to think time was the ticking of a clock somewhere
outside the universe. This appealing, intuitive idea of an absolute
time underpins things like Isaac Newton’s classical laws of motion.

Then, in the early 1900s, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity

blew away the whole idea. They showed that space and time are
part of a unified space-time that is warped by both gravity and
motion. Once again, we thought we understood time and its true
nature. Not for long, though, because quantum mechanics, our best
description of the smallest parts of reality, came along and tore
apart our understanding of time once again.

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 5

WHAT IS TIME?
It is a question that has occupied some of the DEEP understanding of time has
proved almost superfluous to
greatest minds, from the ancient philosophers scientific progress. In physics, for
to the scientists of the Enlightenment and example, Isaac Newton’s laws of
motion, Albert Einstein’s general
beyond. Yet after thousands of years of relativity and quantum theory don’t
contemplation and scientific progress, there require us to know the nature of time
to make them work. Even clock
remains no consensus about what time is. makers needn’t understand time.
Clocks, however, give us a clue
about where to concentrate our efforts because a clock
needs some kind of moving part to gauge the passing
of time. This can be the tick-tock of an escapement, an
oscillating quartz crystal or the ejection of a particle
from a radioactive atom – one way or another, there
must be movement. When something moves, it
changes. Clocks tell us that time is inextricably linked
somehow to change. Yet that only takes us so far. From
this point, there are two paths that lead to completely
opposing views of the true nature of time.
The first concludes that time is a real, fundamental
property of the universe, like space or mass, that
exists in itself. It provides the framework in which
events take place. This was the view taken by Isaac
Newton, who realised that to quantify motion, you
must treat time as if it is as solid as the walls of a house.
Only then can you confidently measure how far and
how fast an object is moving.
MIKHAIL LEONOV/ISTOCK Most physical theories treat time as this >

6 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 7
“Like the pattern of the leaf
from a tree, time might be
something of no significance”
“independent variable”. Time appears this way in Most physicists explain away the illusion that time
Newton’s laws of motion and quantum mechanics, the flows by appealing to the ineluctable rise of entropy.
framework describing fundamental particles and their
interactions. Against time, other things change, but →-
time can’t be changed by anything else. In that sense, See opposite page for an introduction to entropy-
time exists outside physics, like the beat of a
metronome outside the universe to which everything The universe must have started in an implausibly
inside it plays out. ordered configuration, and what we experience as time
Einstein’s theories of relativity, developed in the early is the constant drift away from this state.
20th century, threw such ethereal notions over a barrel. This can’t explain everything, though. By making
In relativity, time is a physical, dynamic thing, fused time part of the physical fabric of a universe that, as far
with space to form space-time – the fabric of the as we can tell, began in a big bang some 13.8 billion
universe itself. And space-time isn’t absolute, but years ago, Einstein’s theory of general relativity implies
relative, warped by motion and gravity. If you travel time itself had a beginning – and perhaps an end, too.
fast, or if you are in a strong gravitational field, it slows In this interpretation, there can be no eternal
down. The discrepancies are imperceptible to us metronome ticking outside the universe, because such
because we live our whole lives in roughly the same a source would have to exist outside space and time
gravitational field and at roughly the same low speeds, itself. This sets up a currently unbridgeable divide
but we have tested them again and again. between relativity and quantum theory since quantum
Going down Einstein’s path leads to a second way of mechanics implies a universal time. In attempting to
viewing time. This is the idea that change, not time, is cross it, researchers hope to make progress towards a
the fundamental property of the universe. In this view, more unified picture of physics – one that would have
time just emerges from our mental efforts to organise to have a very different conception of time.
the changing world we see around us. Newton’s great There is one thing most physicists can agree on,
rival Gottfried Leibniz favoured this style of however. In our experience of the universe, time is
interpretation, which suggests time is not real but something that stops everything happening at once.
created inside our brains. Like the colour or pattern of a Viewed this way, the existence of time can be
tree leaf, time might be something of no significance, interpreted as a necessary precondition for the sort of
the passage of which we invent to make sense of local universe where things lead to other things, among
patterns around us and our own lives. After all, we never them intelligent life that can ask questions, such as
measure time itself, but rather regular changes – be it “what is time?”. ❚
the passage of the seasons, the swing of a pendulum or
the oscillation of a caesium atom – that we reverse- →-
engineer into some mysterious thing we call “time”. For more on quantum time, see chapter 5z

8 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 RELATIVE
TIME
Einstein’s theories of special and general
AN relativity say time is relative. This means
one person’s experience of time would be
INTRODUCTION
different to another’s if they were moving
TO ENTROPY at different speeds or under different
The roots of thermodynamics lie in efforts to gravitational forces.
understand the steam engines that powered the
industrial revolution of 18th and 19th-century
Europe. During that time, the French engineer
Sadi Carnot realised that their heat always tends
to dissipate, moving to cooler regions. Anything ESIDES quantum theory, general
that goes against this grain requires additional relativity is one of two pillars of
energy to power it. modern physics – our working theory
This movement from hotter to cooler is an of gravity and of the very large, of
expression of a more fundamental drive in the planets, galaxies and the universe as a
universe: disorder, as measured by entropy, whole. It is an extension of Einstein’s
always increases. The specifics don’t matter – special theory of relativity – but such a
heat always flows, flipped coins always jumble, massive one that it took him 10 years,
burning logs always turn to ash. from 1905 to 1915, to get from one to
Entropy increase is so universal that many the other.
physicists propose it is why we see time flowing. Special relativity tells us motion warps space and
It is certainly why our hearts must constantly time. It says that the laws of physics are the same for
pump blood, supplying our cells with energy as a any two observers moving at a constant speed relative
temporary stay against the inevitable onset of to each other, a symmetry called Lorentz invariance.
decay and disorder. One consequence is that they would observe each
other’s clocks running at different rates. Each observer
→- would regard themselves as stationary and see the
There is more detail on entropy- other observer’s clock as ticking slowly – an effect called
in chapter 2- time dilation.
Einstein’s central coup with general relativity was to
combine that with a principle noted over three >

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 9

 Massive objects
bend space-time
around them
THE-LIGHTWRITER/GALINA SHAFRAN/ISTOCK

centuries earlier by Galileo: that falling objects weakest of the four known forces of nature – and the
accelerated at the same rate regardless of their mass. only one not explained by quantum theory.
Famously, a feather and a hammer dropped from the According to the theory, time moves more slowly
Leaning Tower of Pisa will hit the ground at the same when gravity is stronger: clocks tick slower at sea level
time, once you discount air resistance. than at the top of a mountain, where the tug of Earth’s
Following Galileo, Isaac Newton showed that this gravity is weaker. This phenomenon has been tested
could only be true if an odd coincidence held: inertial again and again in experiments.
mass, which quantifies a body’s resistance to The relativity of time has wide-ranging
acceleration, must always equal gravitational mass, consequences. Because there is no unique way of
which quantifies a body’s response to gravity. There is defining its passage, there is no unique way of defining
no obvious reason why this should be so, yet no “now”. Einstein concluded that all “nows” – past,
experiment has ever prised these two quantities apart. present and future – must exist simultaneously, a
In the same way that he had used light’s constant picture known as the block universe that is completely
speed to construct the special theory of relativity, at odds with our intuitions.
Einstein declared this a principle of nature: the In this scheme, time doesn’t run in any one direction.
equivalence principle. Armed with this and a new Time’s arrow isn’t fundamental to relativity – or to
conception of space and time as an interwoven “space- quantum theory, for that matter. And that means
time”, you can construct a picture in which gravity is tweaking a detector’s settings to determine the
just a form of acceleration. Massive objects bend space- properties of two entangled particles in a particular
time around them, making things appear to accelerate way can influence the properties those particles gained
towards them. at what we would call an earlier time.
That explains why we feel a downwards pull towards That mismatch occurs because, in our universe, the
Earth and why Earth orbits the sun. Although gravity is speed of light is finite. We can only reach certain times
dominant over large cosmic scales and near very large within a certain, well, time, so we can never achieve
masses like planets or stars, it’s actually by far the that God-like block-universe view. ❚

10 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

TIME
DILATION
Einstein’s theory of relativity shattered the notion that time runs
at the same rate for everyone, everywhere in the universe. And it
has survived every experimental test we have thrown at it.

MAGINE two people, let’s call them Alice If observers who move relative to one another
and Bob. Bob is travelling on a train so he can, cannot agree on the simultaneity of events, they
by the principle of relativity, regard the train cannot agree on measurements of time. Imagine Bob
as at rest in relation to his movement. This carries a perfect, ideal clock which measures time by
concept is similar to how when we stand still on how long it takes light to bounce vertically back and
Earth, we are at rest compared to other objects forth between two mirrors, at right angles to the
on Earth, but in reality, we are all compared to direction in which the train is moving. A passage of a
an observer outside the planet. light pulse from one mirror to the other and back again
Bob sets up a source of light in the middle represents one tick of the clock.
of the carriage and sends off two pulses of light But now look at things from the point of view
in opposite directions at the same time, so that they of Alice, on the platform. While the light pulse is
will reach the end walls of the carriage simultaneously. travelling up and down, the train with the clock and its
But this is not what Alice, who is standing on the mirrors move forward. So, the path travelled by the
platform, sees. light pulse is longer than the up-and-down distance
From the platform, the speed of each of the two light between the two mirrors at rest. But the speed of light is
pulses is the same as the speed measured by Bob, since a constant, so the time taken for one tick of the moving
the speed of light is a constant. But while the light clock is longer, according to Alice, than for one tick of
pulses are moving outward from the centre of the an identical clock sitting on the platform. By the
carriage, the train itself moves forward. Alice sees the principle of relativity, Bob can make the same
pulse that moves backwards hit the back wall of the calculation, but he is still regarding the train as at rest.
carriage before the forward moving pulse hits the front He infers that the clock on the platform is running
wall. In other words, the arrival of the light pulses at the slow. We can’t compare the readings of the separated
carriage ends is considered simultaneous by one clocks “at the same instant” until we decide what “at
observer but seen to occur at different times for a the same instant” means. And Bob and Alice have
second observer moving relative to the first. different views on this. ❚

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 11

TESTING
TIME DILATION
Relativity predicts that time slows down in a the Alps is 84 nanoseconds longer than in Turin.
Then, in 2023 the world’s most precise atomic clock
gravitational field, making clocks run a little confirmed it works at the scale of millimetres. Tobias
slower on Earth’s surface than in deep space – Bothwell at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, and his
colleagues separated hundreds of thousands of
something that is testable. strontium atoms into “pancake-shaped” blobs of 30
atoms. They used optical light to trap these into a
vertical stack 1 millimetre high. Then they shone a laser
on the stack and measured the scattered light with a
IME dilation effects have been high-speed camera.
demonstrated in many experiments. Because the atoms were arranged vertically, Earth’s
One, in 1971, sent some of the most gravity caused the frequency of oscillations in each
accurate clocks we have made yet, group to shift by a different amount, an effect called
atomic clocks – which work using lasers gravitational redshift. At the top of the clock, a second
to bounce the electrons in an atom at a was measured as 10-19 of a second longer than it was at
given frequency – flying on aeroplanes. the bottom. This means if you were to run the clock for
The clocks on planes fell behind clocks the age of the universe – about 14 billion years – it
that stayed put on the ground, due to the would only be off by 0.1 second.
difference in velocity. Another, in 1980,
showed that an atomic clock sped up when launched →-
on a rocket 10,000 kilometres above Earth’s surface, For more on atomic clocks, turn to chapter 3-
where the planet’s gravitational field is weaker.
In recent decades, time dilation has been tested to Because relativity predicts that time is skewed by
further extremes using atomic clocks. In 2018, velocity differences between observers, it can give rise
Christian Lisdat at the National Metrology Institute of to the so-called twin paradox. A twin who returns from
Germany and his colleagues put one of the most a journey in a fast-moving spacecraft will have aged
accurate atomic clocks, a strontium atomic clock, on less than the twin who stayed home.
the move with a specially designed trailer. It had rubber The twin paradox came to life in 2015. From
dampers to mitigate vibrations, and climate control to March 2015 to March 2016, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly
stabilise the temperature. They used the clock to test spent a year in space aboard the International Space
the idea that clocks run slower at sea level than at the Station and his twin brother Mark, was earthbound.
top of a mountain, where the tug of Earth’s gravity is The ISS orbits Earth at 7.71 kilometres per second, so
less strong. To confirm this, the team took Scott aged roughly 10 milliseconds less than Mark over
measurements in the mountains of Modane, France, the year, which was – of course – far too small of an
and in lower-lying Turin, Italy. They found that a year in effect to pick up. ❚

12 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 COSMOLOGICAL
TIME DILATION
HE idea that time appears to be slower in
Time seems to have ticked more
the past sounds odd, but it is a direct
slowly when the universe was consequence of the expansion of the
universe since the big bang. This
young, according to observations
expansion means that light from ancient
of ancient astronomical objects. cosmic events must travel increasingly
longer distances to reach Earth, so takes
more time to arrive.
As a result, cosmic events that are
extremely distant or far back in time
appear to unfold more slowly compared with the same
event happening nearby, right now. That isn’t to say the
Quasar 3C 273 was the first quasar early universe was in slow motion, however – anyone
to be identified and is the brightest present billions of years ago would have seen time
in the sky as seen from Earth evolving normally.
Since the 1990s, astrophysicists have observed this
celestial time warp in distant supernovae – powerful
stellar explosions – with the oldest one going back to
around half the age of the universe and appearing to
evolve at 60 per cent of the speed we see today. In 2023,
Geraint Lewis at the University of Sydney, Australia,
and Brendon Brewer at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand, detected a more extreme version earlier
in the universe.
The pair looked at 190 quasars, which are objects
at the centre of some galaxies comprised of a
supermassive black hole surrounded by a disc of hot
plasma that spit out high energy particles. They are
among the oldest objects in the universe, with the
earliest we have seen emerging just 600 million years
ESA/HUBBLE AND NASA

after the big bang. The duo found that the earliest
quasar, which is at a distance putting it around
1 billion years after the beginning of the universe,
appeared to run five times more slowly than quasars
from today. ❚

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 13

THE BLOCK UNIVERSE
Imagine standing outside the universe. Not just outside space, but outside time too. At one end,
you see its beginning: the big bang. At the other, you see whatever it is that happens there. From
this impossible block universe perspective, time does not flow, and there is no “now”.

CCORDING to Einstein’s special and future. Quantum physics supplies an objectively

theory of relativity, there is no way to defined present moment: it is the boundary between
specify events that everyone can what our experiments have determined and what
agree happen simultaneously. Two remains to be determined. One alternative is that we
events that are both “now” to you will live on the leading edge of a “growing block” universe,
happen at different times for anyone on a surface we call the present that shimmers into
moving at another speed. Other existence one moment at a time as quantum
people will see a different now that measurements are made.
might contain elements of yours – but The growing block universe idea depends on the
equally might not. truth of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
The consequence of this is a picture known as the mechanics. This is the idea that acts of measurement
block universe: the universe seen from an impossible determine the world’s future trajectory, and it is the
vantage point outside space and time. You can mark most popular way among physicists to square
what you think is “now” with a red dot, but there is quantum theory’s indeterminacy with the decidedly
nothing that distinguishes that place from any other, determined world around us. But there are
except that you are there. Past and future are no more alternatives, like the many worlds scenario, in which
physically distinguished than left and right. There are every quantum possibility occurs in different
things that are closer to you in time, and things that are universes: the present Schrödinger’s cat is dead in
further away, just as there are things that are near or far some universes, but alive in others. The cat’s future is
away in space. But the idea that time flows past you is just as defined as its past; it just has many possible
just as absurd as the suggestion that space does. futures. If this interpretation – or any other of the many
This block universe picture is at odds with quantum interpretations of quantum theory – is correct, the
physics. In quantum physics, indeterminate future growing block universe vanishes.
outcomes are seemingly governed by probabilities in Einstein, for one, drew solace from the view of the
the present. Quantum objects exist in “superpositions” timeless universe he had helped to create, consoling the
of more than one state until such time as we measure family of a recently deceased friend: “Now he has
them, when they adopt one or other of their possible departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.
forms. The most notorious illustration is Schrödinger’s That means nothing. People like us, who believe in
cat: locked in a box with a vial of poison whose seal may physics, know that the distinction between past, present
or may not be intact, it is simultaneously dead and alive and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” ❚
– until you open the box, when it is most definitely one
or the other. →-
Such quantum oddities are a blow to the block- See chapter 5 for more on-
universe conception of an equally real past, present quantum mechanics-

14 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

ESSAY

The cosmos is stranger than we ever imagined and new

bubbles of space-time may pop up and grow continuously with
no beginning or end, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

ART of what turned me into a
theoretical cosmology enthusiast as a
child was watching the documentary
A Brief History of Time and hearing
about the mystery around the big bang.
It showed how the equations that we
use to describe space-time broke down
into a singularity when we ran time all
PROFILE the way back to the beginning.
CHANDA When the film came out in 1991,
PRESCOD- popular science books and magazines used the term
big bang to refer to the moment when our universe
WEINSTEIN came to be. It was the beginning of time and the
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein beginning of space, and thus the beginning of space-
time. In a very basic way, this wasn’t super hard to relate
is an assistant professor of
to. For example, in my family’s own Jewish tradition,
physics and astronomy, our origin story for the universe begins quite similarly.
and a core faculty member The story goes that in the beginning of space and
in women’s studies at the time, space-time exploded out of nothing and then
University of New Hampshire. rapidly expanded. The expansion was so fast that it
Her research in theoretical grew faster than the speed of light, because it turns out
that the only thing that can violate the universal speed
physics focuses on cosmology,
limit is space-time itself. This era, known as inflation,
neutron stars and particles was first simultaneously hypothesised by Alan Guth,
beyond the standard model. Alexei Starobinsky, Andrei Linde and a team comprised
of Martin Einhorn and Katsuhiko Sato. They were all
motivated by a desire to try to explain phenomena that
astronomers had observed. >

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 15

 The idea that space and time aren’t completely
separate entities is a relatively new one. Their merger is
a theoretical necessity induced by Albert Einstein’s
relativity, which tells us that when two of us are moving
with respect to each other, your space and my time can
mix: time and space aren’t as independent as they feel
on everyday, human scales.
The expansion of space-time itself can also be hard to
fully grasp because it is so different from everyday life.
Readers may have previously heard an analogy that
space-time expansion is akin to galaxies racing away
from each other like fast cars driving in opposite
directions. The reality is more fantastical than that.
Imagine a not-yet inflated balloon covered in little dots.

STOCKCRAFTER/ISTOCK
As you blow up the balloon, the distance between the
dots grows. This is what the expansion of space-time is
like. Galaxies aren’t racing apart but rather space-time
is growing between them.
This expansion isn’t anything to worry about,
because it is only happening on very large scales, not
on the scale of our solar system, where gravity is
playing its part to keep things together.
When our space-time was less than a second old, this
expansion accelerated faster than the speed of light for
a very brief moment. Imagine a percentage of a second
with 40 zeros after the decimal. That is how long
cosmic inflation occurred for. This expansion was
exponential. To get a sense of what this means, buy a
loaf of bread and wait until it shows signs of mould.
Once there is a little, it will become a lot very quickly.
This is because the microorganisms ruining your bread
are reproducing at an exponential rate.
I am now a professor of physics and when I attend
physics conferences, I have a very different relationship
to the idea of the big bang than I did back in the early
90s. One might expect that this is because I have gone

16 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

“An eternally inflating universe
implies that we live in one
space-time bubble of many”
through extensive technical training, including big bang and these days there are fewer. While I
passing intense postgraduate exams on general can’t speak to publishing choices by editors, I can say
relativity and quantum field theory in relativistic that in recent years, there has been more (if not total)
space-times. And it’s true, my understanding of what consensus in the cosmology community about the
that mysterious singularity represented deepened. likely scenario for the inflationary universe – that
But actually, what lay people like me didn’t know our space-time went through a period of rapid,
30 years ago is that a transformation was already exponential expansion. A plethora of data supports
happening in the physics community. How people the inflationary picture, which mathematically favours
were thinking about the big bang was shifting. The big an eternal scenario.
bang no longer necessarily referred to the beginning. There are, of course, detractors. Paul Steinhardt,
And there may not have been a beginning at all – at one of the early thinkers on inflation, has since become
least not in the traditional terms. one of its most vocal critics. But even in his competitor
There have been two changes to the way physicists model of the universe, the big bang is replaced by a
think about this cosmological timeline. The first is that big bounce and a cyclic universe. The key point,
research on inflationary models, which study the ultimately, is that physicists don’t like singularities,
exponential expansion of space-time, indicate that and the search has always been on for a more satisfying
inflation may be an eternal process. As in, the universe model. Much as the idea of a “beginning moment”
may not have had a beginning moment, and we may might satisfy the intuition we have developed in a
live in what is called an eternally inflating universe, one world where some of the most dominant religious
that was expanding exponentially even before what we traditions teach us that there is a definitive beginning,
call the big bang. Mathematically, this seems the most from a scientific point of view, the singularity is a
likely scenario – assuming inflation is correct. mathematical problem to be solved.
Second, these days, people often use “hot big bang” Models of the very early universe are hard to test
to refer to a time period, rather than a single moment. directly. That doesn’t stop people from trying. For
The story goes that in the early stages of our corner of example, an eternally inflating universe implies that
space-time, what we might call the visible universe, the we live in one space-time bubble of many.
universe was very hot and dense. This hot big bang era Astrophysicist Hiranya V. Peiris, famous for her work
was filled with an energetic goo from which atoms on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation,
would eventually emerge and begin to cluster, along has with co-authors proposed that CMB data can be
with dark matter, into the structures we observe today: used to test interactions between our space-time
stars, galaxies, planets and, yes, people. bubble and others.
In a recent email to me and my editor, one of these If I had to theorise why it is less popular to write
people structures – a thoughtful reader – sent in a about this in popular publications, I’d say it is because
question that points to this transformation in how we there haven’t been any new splashy ideas about it
think about the big bang. The reader noted that, for a recently. The question of whether there was a
while, it was fashionable to publish articles about the beginning, of course, remains infinitely interesting. ❚

Chapter 1 | The basics of time | 17

CHAPTER 2

18 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

The way we experience the world suggests we are just passengers
on a journey being swept along by the unstoppable flow of time. Even
a child would intuit that time flows forwards. The big question is why
does time only flow in one direction?

A good place to start is the second law of thermodynamics.

It expresses a fundamental and simple truth about the universe:
that disorder always increases. You can scramble an egg, for example,
but you can never unscramble it. Entropy is how we measure this
disorder in a system, and entropy increase is so universal that many
physicists propose it is why we see time flowing.

But not everyone agrees. Some argue the question should not be
why time flows but whether it flows at all, or whether its relentless
onwards march is just an illusion.

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 19

 EARCHING for time’s arrow in the

TIME’S underlying, microscopic laws of physics

certainly draws a blank. They give us no
reason to think atoms, molecules and

ARROW
so on can’t move backwards as well as
forwards in time, much as they (and we)
move freely in three dimensions of
space. These laws don’t differentiate
between past, present and future, or
between cause and effect.
Time, as we all know, only moves in We have to zoom out a little to find a physical law that
one direction. At least it does for us. does not work just as well back in time as it does
forwards. “That distinction only becomes relevant in
The question of why, however, doesn’t the macroscopic world, where our incomplete
come with a simple answer. information about the precise physical configuration
of a system leads us to perceive an arrow of time, and to
put causes first and effects after,” says physicist Sean
Carroll at the California Institute of Technology.
There are more ways for any system of particles to
have high entropy than low entropy, so things naturally
tend towards high-entropy states. Where entropy is
high, we lose any chance of knowing a system’s precise
physical configuration, because there are so many
equivalent options. If we could gain all that
information, time would still exist, in the sense that the
system could still evolve. But time’s arrow would
disappear, because any “forwards” evolution would run
equally plausibly “backwards” from the configuration
in which we see it. “The increase of entropy is
responsible for all of our impressions that the past is
different from the future, including the impression
ZHEKA-BOSS/ISTOCK that time flows,” says Carroll – and our ignorance lies >

20 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 21
NASA/JPL/WMAP SCIENCE TEAM

Cosmic inflation describes

the explosive expansion of
the universe in the instants
after the big bang

at its heart. At first, inflation seems to solve the dilemma of why

What is true in classical physics is doubly so in the there was so little disorder in the early universe. On
quantum world. Here, uncertainties that, in the closer inspection, however, it only pushes the problem
classical world, we put down to a lack of knowledge back another step. In order for inflation to occur in the
seem to represent uncertainties intrinsic to reality, right way to produce our universe, the field driving the
although that interpretation is itself up for debate. For expansion, known as the inflaton field, has to have
some, arguments equating time’s passage with rising some remarkably unlikely properties. So while the
entropy are passé, anyway. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter inflaton field explains the mystery of the low entropy
Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, universe, it itself has low entropy. How do physicists
for one, believes that the problem of time’s arrow account for that?
indicates not just a lack of information, but a gaping One possibility is that inflation didn’t happen just
hole in our understanding of the underlying laws of once. Let’s say the inflaton field started out in a chaotic,
nature. A sign that we are going about everything in the high entropy state – a more likely scenario – so that its
wrong way and that quantum mechanics needs a properties varied from place to place. The low entropy
shake-up. Others think the gradual revelation of inflaton that gave rise to our smooth universe and
classical certainties through quantum measurements therefore our arrow of time would be just a random
is the true source of time’s arrow. blip in a larger, high entropy field. Some parts of the
But even if entropy is the answer, that just shifts the field would have the right conditions to produce a
question. For entropy always to rise, the universe must universe like ours, others would remain sterile or
have started with an astoundingly low amount. And would produce other universes.
there is no real explanation or reason why the universe In fact, the physics of the inflaton field predicts an
should have begun with such a high degree of order. infinite multiverse. Several strands of evidence now
Cosmologists have somewhat of an explanation. In converge on the multiverse, leading many
the first fraction of a second after the beginning of cosmologists to take the idea seriously. In a multiverse,
time, the universe went through a brief but dramatic some universes would have arrows of time while many
burst of expansion known as inflation, which stretched more would not. We should not be surprised to find
space like a rubber sheet and smoothed out any ourselves in one that does, since that is the only kind of
wrinkles. universe that could give rise to life. ❚

←- →-
For more on cosmic inflation,- To delve into how we perceive-
turn back to chapter 1- time see chapter 4-

22 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

WHAT IS ENTROPY?
The inescapable rise of entropy is one of the Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) had laid the rules of
thermodynamics out in two laws, later extended to four.
only physical processes that is not reversible Ludwig Boltzmann soon made things a bit more
in time, and one that has been tested in all precise. He knew that the mechanical work done by a
hot gas like steam came from the motion of the
kinds of experiments. But how exactly molecules, but he also recognised that it was
entropy is produced remains a mystery. impossible to calculate how every individual atom or
molecule in a given system moves. So he suggested
working with probabilities. Boltzmann introduced
T ALL started during the industrial revolution, entropy, which he defined in terms of the number of
when Victorian engineers were desperately different possible ways in which molecules in a closed
trying to figure out why their coal-powered system could be arranged. The more possible
steam engines were so inefficient and improve arrangements, the greater the entropy.
the design and efficiency of existing labour- Boltzmann’s entropy worked surprisingly well to
saving “engines”, like the waterwheel and describe thermal systems such as steam engines – and
windmill. This new industrial world it is still hard at work, with physicists and chemists
represented an exciting playground for natural using it daily. But difficult questions were raised as
philosophers, where they could start to dissect early as 1867, when James Clerk Maxwell devised a
the mystery of energy and the rules governing thought experiment in which a crafty demon lurked
how it is transformed into useful work. Entropy was inside a box of molecules divided in two. The molecules
essentially a mathematical way to quantify heat that start off evenly mixed, with no difference in
wasn’t available for doing useful mechanical work, temperature between the compartments, and thus no
such as driving a piston. ability to do useful mechanical work. But the demon
In the 1840s, French engineer Sadi Carnot discovered uses its knowledge of the molecules’ movements to
that heat always tends to dissipate, moving to cooler separate hot ones from slower cold ones by opening a
regions. Anything that goes against this grain requires door between the two.
additional energy to power it. That too is because the That posed a problem. The demon seems to have
jostling molecules of something hot are more rendered the system ready to do work: open the door
disordered than those of something cool. In the 1860s, and the energetic molecules will be able to push a
Rudolf Clausius defined heat as the amount of heat piston. In other words, the demon has reduced the
energy you could put into a system without raising its system’s entropy, violating the second law of
temperature by a degree. By 1860, Clausius and William thermodynamics, which holds that the entropy of a >

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 23

closed system will always increase over time.
This is considered the most far-reaching and robust
law of nature. “The second law cannot be violated, THE SECOND LAW
never, in no situation, under no circumstances,” says
Sebastian Deffner at the University of Maryland, As time passes in a closed system – one where
Baltimore County. “Every time we run into an apparent nothing can go in or out – entropy will always
violation, we find we have overlooked a contribution to increase. This is the second law of
the entropy production.” thermodynamics, and it is perhaps the most
That was certainly the case with Maxwell’s demon. profound of the four laws of thermodynamics.
What had been overlooked turned out to be a vital Its importance is best expressed by sketching
component of how we now understand physical out a situation that violates it. Imagine placing 20
systems: information. coins, heads up, on a tray, filming it as you give it
Accounting for the cost of deleting information a shake and then playing the film backwards.
restores some balance to the demon’s thermodynamic The coins start out as a jumbled mess, but all
world, but it was a little unsatisfactory. The demon still jump and eventually come to rest with the same
gets away with bending the second law for a while – side up – an unreal, slightly creepy sequence.
until its head gets too full. A crucial result came in 2008, Similarly, imagine an egg yolk and white
from Takahiro Sagawa and Masahito Ueda at the Tokyo reassembling themselves after you’ve cracked it
Institute of Technology. The pair worked out that you open, or even a world where it’s just as easy to
can salvage the second law by adding an extra term pair up your socks in the right pairs as it is to
called mutual information: a measure of how much the jumble them up.
demon knows about whatever system it is looking at. The laws of thermodynamics only hold true as
This updated second law shows how much work you statistical averages, and some think the second
can extract from a system for a given amount of law won’t be so cast-iron on the very small
demonic knowledge. scales of quantum physics where few particles
The second law emerged unscathed again, but it isn’t are involved. Some physicists even think
just about heat, or the numbers of ways molecules can quantum machines might bend the rules or
be arranged, or work. Deep down, entropy seems to be cause them to be cast in a new form.
about information. Now the mystery continues, since If the second law predicts the flow of time, in
we don’t fully understand how information is turned its classical form it also predicts the ultimate
into entropy. In getting a better understanding of fate of the universe. As entropy increases,
entropy, we might one day gain a clearer understanding eventually there’s no more order to make chaos
of whether entropy creates the arrow of time or if it is from, and ultimately interesting things will stop
just a consequence of it. ❚ happening. The universe will reach a long, slow
“heat death”.
→-
Chapter 5 has more on quantum thermodynamics-

24 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

CAUSE AND EFFECT
At the heart of our experience of the arrow of time is causality: something
happens that, some time later, causes something else. You drop a glass on the
floor and it will shatter, it won’t shatter before it is dropped. But, like many of
these concepts related to time, it is not always so simple.

HE first big rule of classical causality is the door to the future influencing the past.
that things have causes. They don’t just Unfortunately, matters of cause and effect get
happen of their own accord. If a ball distinctly murkier in the other realm of modern
moves, the likelihood is someone kicked physics, the quantum world. Unlike relativity, which
it; if an apple falls from a tree, it’s because governs the universe on large scales – the scales of
its weight became too great for the stars, planets and galaxies – quantum theory
branch it was hanging from. determines the workings of very small things such as
Second, effects follow causes in a individual particles.
predictable, linear manner. You swing The quantum world is plagued by what Einstein
your leg, make contact with the ball, and called “spooky action at a distance” – influences
off it moves, in that order and no other. travelling seemingly instantaneously between
Third, big effects grow up from little causes. A piston, particles, where measuring the state of one seems to
for example, starts to move when a lot of individual hot influence the state of the other far faster than the speed
atoms hit against it and push it a certain way. The laws of light. Experiments have shown that two events can
of thermodynamics, which govern the way atoms indeed seem to happen both before and after one
move, then provide certain rules about what causes can another, opening the way on the quantum scale to
precipitate what effects, and so an overall direction for what’s called “retrocausality” – the future influencing
causality – a flow of time. the present, which can influence the past.
Modern science presents a number of challenges to What that means no one quite knows. At the
this naive view of causality. Einstein’s special and very least it seems our conceptions of causality
general theories of relativity, for example, abandon the need to be modified in some way in the quantum
idea of a single line of time along which causes and world. Or perhaps causality is preserved, and it’s our
effects can be strung. Time is warped by the presence of conceptions of space and time that don’t quite work
large masses or when travelling at high speed, and on that scale.
passes at different rates for different observers. Some scientists have even argued that “bottom up”
Even so, relativity bends over backwards to maintain causality, where big effects at large scales grow up from
a sensible conception of cause and effect as we know it. lots of little effects at small scales, needs to be
The key is the speed of light, which relativity insists is a abandoned in favour of some kind of “top-down”
constant. It represents the maximum speed that any causality, where cause and effect are imposed from
influence can travel in the universe. some larger scale. And it’s even possible that the
Relativity shows that the overall effect of this classical laws of thermodynamics, with their strict rules
stipulation is to make it impossible for an event to come of what can cause what, do not have quite the same
before another in one observer’s frame of reference, and validity at the quantum scale.
after it in another observer’s frame of reference. That’s That’s all very speculative, though. At the moment,
why suggestions of things travelling faster than the the best we can say is that at the scales we work at:
speed of light cause such a furore: they’d destroy any assume cause…then effect. Whether the world truly
sensible concept we have of what causes what, opening works that way is another question. ❚

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 25

INTERVIEW

THE CASE FOR A

PARALLEL UNIVERSE GOING
BACKWARDS IN TIME
Cosmological inflation is the idea that, in its first moments, the universe
underwent a sudden, extreme expansion. Neil Turok suggests an alternative:
a mirror universe stretching backwards in time from the big bang.

Can you first explain how the idea of inflation became dogma?
Inflation was based on an “aha!” moment around 1980.
People were building grand unified models of particle
physics, which encompass all the known fundamental
forces and particles, except for gravity. To make the
models work, they had to introduce fields with potential
PROFILE energy. When you couple these fields to gravity, their
NEIL potential energy behaves a bit like an explosive: it
TUROK causes the universe to blow up in size. The explosive
expansion can turn a small, lumpy universe into a huge,
smooth, flat universe like the one we see around us.
Neil Turok is a theoretical
The second insight, which persuaded many people, is
physicist working on that inflationary expansion isn’t perfectly smooth and
fundamental theories of uniform. The field that drives inflation fluctuates
cosmology. He is a former quantum mechanically, so that inflation lasts longer in
director of the Perimeter some places than in others. As a result, the early universe
Institute for Theoretical becomes slightly lumpy. Much later, the denser regions
collapse to form galaxies while the less dense regions
Physics in Waterloo, Canada,
expand to form the voids between galaxies.
now at the University of
Edinburgh, UK. It seems to explain a lot about the universe we see today.
What is the problem?
What makes some of us uneasy about inflation is that it
is contrived. You must assume that inflationary

26 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 How did those suspicions lead you to the idea of a
mirror universe?
Our first step was a surprisingly trivial observation.
We know that the early universe was dominated by hot
radiation. This means that, if you rewind the clock from
there, the size of the universe shrinks to zero in a very
simple way. Mathematically, you can follow a straight
line which cuts through the big bang. This allows us to
extrapolate backwards to another “mirror image” copy
of our universe on the other side of the big bang.
Our universe and its mirror image are related by a
symmetry of nature called CPT, or “charge-parity-time
reversal”, symmetry. CPT symmetry is based on deep
principles of quantum theory and general relativity
that have been confirmed in many experiments. The
“charge” bit means you take every particle in our
universe and exchange it with an anti-particle. The
NIBALI NEZZAR

“parity” bit means that you take a right-spinning

particle in our universe and replace it with its left-
spinning version. And the “time reversal” aspect means
that you run time backwards in the mirror universe.
To be clear, our universe by itself does not seem to
respect CPT symmetry. Time only runs forward, and
potential energy was dominant in the early universe there is more matter than antimatter. But the
and strong enough to start the explosion. You must combination of our universe and the mirror universe
adjust the initial conditions and the potential energy to no longer violates CPT symmetry. This was the driver
keep inflation going for a sufficiently long time. Then, behind our mirror universe idea.
you must adjust the parameters in the model to get the
right level of lumpiness. If you were a resident on the other side, in the mirror
For example, the temperature of the radiation from universe, how would you know?
the hot big bang, known as the cosmic microwave You wouldn’t. It’s impossible to determine by any local
background, varies across the sky by only a few parts in measurement which “side” you are on. We’re not
a hundred thousand. Inflationary models don’t explain postulating a pre-big bang universe, somehow
that small number: they are just adjusted to fit it. different from our universe. Instead, the pre-bang and
Because there are so few independent ways available to post-bang universes are mirror images of each other.
test inflation, and so much freedom to build and adjust
inflationary models, inflation can seem more like a Are there mirror image copies of the sun, Earth and
“just so” story than a compelling explanation. even us in the mirror universe?
The great theories of physics are quite different. James Classically, the mirror universe is the exact mirror
Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism has very image of ours. Quantum mechanically, things are more
few adjustable parameters in its equations and makes a subtle, because you have to take quantum uncertainty
vast array of testable predictions. Likewise, Albert into account. When a quantum state is observed, there
Einstein’s theory of gravity has essentially only one are many possible outcomes, each with its own
adjustable number, telling you how strongly gravity probability of being measured. In the mirror universe
couples to matter. Yet it predicts a great diversity of picture, there are strong correlations between what
phenomena, from black holes to gravitational waves, would be observed on the two sides of the big bang, but
each of which has been verified by experiments. the exact pattern of variations would not be identical. >

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 27

So, most likely there isn’t another New Scientist show no evidence for this. Indeed, as we examine the
magazine on the other side of the big bang. Nor can we universe at larger and larger scales, we find it becomes
communicate with the other side because the time an more and more simple.
observer would perceive only progresses forward, away The mirror universe picture is far more economical,
from the big bang and we cannot alter our past. predictable and uniform. The two sides of the universe
grow steadily in opposite directions away from the big
What makes you think this mirror universe explains our bang, governed by the known laws of gravity and
universe better than inflation? particle physics. The extreme simplicity of the large-
It wasn’t until 2022 that the mirror universe picture scale universe, which is very smooth and flat, is a direct
began to fall into place. We understood how the result of the simplicity of these laws.
smoothness and flatness of the universe, on large scales,
could be explained without any need for inflation. You also say the mirror universe goes further, explaining
We used a mathematical tool called gravitational things inflation can’t.
entropy – originally devised by Stephen Hawking and In 2018, we realised our idea could solve the puzzle of
others to count the number of ways a black hole could dark matter, the mysterious substance that holds
be made from quantum units of space-time. You can galaxies together, in terms of particles that we have not
use the idea of entropy, a measure of disorder, to directly seen but already have strong evidence for.
explain the most likely state of a physical system. For These are called right-handed neutrinos. They have
example, when you carefully count the number of ways been invoked since the 1970s to explain the tiny masses
that the air molecules in a room can be arranged, in the of left-handed neutrinos, which have been observed.
vast majority of cases the molecules are very evenly Whereas every other model of dark matter postulates a
distributed around the room. The probability that they completely new particle, we don’t have to. That came as
will pile up in a corner is tiny. a huge surprise.
Using Hawking’s method we were able to calculate
the number of possible cosmic histories for a mirror- You have said it can solve another puzzle, too.
symmetric universe filled with radiation, matter and Yes. The quantum fields in the standard model of
dark energy. Dark energy is added to explain the particle physics have important symmetries which we
accelerating expansion of the universe. We found that believe are fundamental to their mathematical
the vast majority of universes that resulted are very consistency. But when we study quantum fields in a
smooth and flat, and that a small amount of dark curved space-time, like a black hole or an expanding
energy is favoured. Our universe is expected in the universe, some of the symmetries are spoiled by
mirror universe theory. We no longer need inflation to infinities – just like those in the vacuum energy. When
understand the smoothness and flatness of the universe. we added just the right number of dimension zero
fields to the standard model, all of these infinities
What is different in terms of the birth and evolution of cancelled. The infinite vacuum energy and the
the early universe in this picture compared with the big bang symmetry violations all disappear. This cancellation
plus inflation? also requires that there are three and only three
According to inflation, the early universe explodes into generations of elementary particles – including, for
an infinite number of wildly different universes, example, electrons, muons and taus – just as we see.
known as the inflationary multiverse. Observations It’s hard to convey how much more predictive the

28 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 TIME
mirror universe idea has turned out to be than we ever
expected. You have to pinch yourself! It’s taken us by
surprise, because with a few small tweaks to known
physics we’re essentially rewriting the whole story of

TRAVEL
cosmology.

If it explains so much, why are many cosmologists

hostile to the idea?
We haven’t faced outright hostility. We’ve been pleasantly
surprised. Among the community of people who are The physics thought to explain the arrow
more open-minded to alternatives, many are very
curious. There is, however, a very large body of of time is not as simple as you might think –
scientists who have been focused on building and in traversable wormholes, Einstein’s
inflationary models and fitting them to the data. They
tend to be sceptical about an entirely new framework. theory of general relativity does in principle
Communities who have spent decades working on offer routes to the past.
inflation are naturally reluctant to change.

Do you make solid predictions?

I take observations extremely seriously. Good science HILE most physicists agree
has to prove itself. I’ve opted for economical theories, that there is a link between
which are predictive and can be ruled out. If they prove entropy and the arrow of
successful, rival theories will fall by the wayside. But time, how they relate is
we’re not yet at the point where our story is compelling disputed. Some physicists
and fully supported by observations. think increasing entropy
gives time its arrow, while
What are the chances we will actually resolve these some say the arrow is just an
questions around the big bang? illusion. Others think we lack
Einstein famously said that the Lord is subtle, but not a basic understanding of
malicious. In cosmology, nature has posed some time and, perhaps, marrying the quantum and classical
profound puzzles: the big bang, the origin of matter, worlds together will lead us to a new way of thinking
energy and time. Nature is subtle, but it’s also been about it. Some theories do away with entropy in the
extremely generous to us. From the same laws of picture of time altogether.
physics that we learned in our backyard – on Earth and However, some solutions to the equations of general
in the solar system – we predicted black holes and relativity appear to provide a route to the past.
gravitational waves. We have no right to understand Einstein’s theory predicts that time runs more slowly in
such remote phenomena. It’s kind of absurd. In order strong gravity, so you grow old more slowly living in a
for us to understand the universe, we must hope that bungalow than in a skyscraper: being closer to the
nature’s generosity continues. I work on the ground, you are in marginally stronger gravity. So, to
assumption that it will. ❚ make a time machine, you simply have to connect >

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 29

 TIME LOOPS
In most science-fiction scenarios, sending
messages back in time requires information
to move faster than the speed of light. But in
theoretical universes where causal loops are
allowed, such law-breaking physics isn’t
required.
A causal loop is a classic time travel
conundrum. If you send information to the
past – say, you give Albert Einstein the
formula E=mc² before he theorises it himself,
then he publishes it and you go on to find it in a
textbook – you would create a situation in
which the information has no true origin.
In 2022, researchers mathematically
two regions where time flows at different rates. modelled a set of theoretical universes where
Take, for instance, Earth and the immediate vicinity all that is known is that there are people who
of a black hole, where strong gravity makes time flow can discern information and act on it, but who
extremely slowly. Say you start two clocks ticking on can’t communicate faster than light. They
Monday at the two locations. When Friday comes didn’t require the universes to obey any
around on Earth, it will still be only Wednesday by the specific physical laws, such as how gravity
black hole. So if you could travel instantaneously from works. They found that causal loops could be
Earth to near the black hole, you could travel from mathematically possible in universes that
Friday back to Wednesday. Hey presto: time travel. they didn’t theorise as being particularly odd
The question is, can you? In Einstein’s theory, the or exotic from the start.
acceleration towards massive objects caused by a Such causal loops would disturb reality by
gravitational field is described as a curvature in space- removing the origin of some information, but
time itself. Curve something enough, with enough they seem to be possible in universes with
gravity, and you could form a loop. These closed time- one spatial dimension. Somewhat mind-
like curvatures (CTCs) crop up in various theoretical bogglingly, this case is like being able to cause
descriptions of the universe, from swirling dust to Einstein to discover his famous equation
spinning cosmic strings, which are one-dimensional based on information from his future without
blips in space-time that could span astronomical ever directly communicating with him.
distances. The causal loops examined don’t
This could open the door to all manner of mischief, necessarily lead to dramatic paradoxes, but
such as the paradox of killing your own grandfather they do show that past and future can be
before your father was born. Fortunately, most correlated in counter-intuitive ways. Whether
scenarios that lead to CTCs are deemed impossible to causal loops can happen in our universe is
physically occur. However, according to quantum still an open question.
theory, the fabric of space-time is a tangle of sub- Our universe, with space-time structured
microscopic shortcuts through space and time known the way it is and where nothing can move
as wormholes. A few steps along such a tunnel and you faster than light, is similar to the universes
might emerge light years away on the other side of the examined in the new analysis. But the three
galaxy, or years in the past or future. If an infinitely spatial dimensions in our universe may
advanced civilisation could construct, for instance, a change the mathematics of causal loops just
traversable wormhole, a tunnel between two points in enough to make them impossible.
space and time, then who knows? Maybe they could
create a CTC and travel backwards in time after all. ❚

30 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

WHEN TIME RUNS
BACKWARDS: WHAT
THERMODYNAMICS
TEACHES US ABOUT LIFE
The second law of thermodynamics, which gives us an arrow of
time, is routinely violated at the smallest scales – an insight that is
yielding clues to some of biology’s great mysteries.

N 1878, James Clerk Maxwell wrote: “The truth happily followed the beam.
of the second law is therefore a statistical not a Instead, over the course of hundreds of repetitions,
mathematical truth, for it depends on the fact the bead occasionally pushed ahead of the beam.
that the bodies we deal with consist of millions Although lasting only about 2 seconds at a time, these
of molecules… Hence the second law of little acts of rebellion were violations of the second law
thermodynamics is continually being violated.” of thermodynamics.
What this means is there are rare interactions Not only was this the first time violations had been
between atoms and molecules where entropy is observed over these time and length scales, but the
lost instead of gained, as if the process were numbers also matched a modern twist on the second
running backwards in time. law of thermodynamics that Evans and his collaborator
For natural processes, like a cup of coffee inevitably Debra Bernhardt at the University of Queensland,
going cold, violations in the form of a few energy Australia, had cooked up in the early 1990s. This
gaining interactions make no difference to the overall “fluctuation theorem” tinkered with the second law so
trend towards a state with the lowest energy and most it could be studied with statistics. Where the traditional
disorder. But things are very different in the nanoworld. law is hardwired so that entropy always increases as
Back in 2001, Denis Evans at the Australian National time moves forward – coffee cools, engines burn petrol
University in Canberra and his colleagues fired a laser and so on – their stochastic theory explained how
beam at a micrometre-sized latex bead suspended in entropy could rise or fall for tiny, individual processes
water. They were using the laser as “optical tweezers”, while still ensuring that, averaged out at larger scales, it
now a common technique for grabbing tiny objects always increased.
with a light field. In their experiment, the bead’s curved More generally, the fluctuation theorem showed how
surface acted like a lens, bending the laser light and different thermodynamics is when you zoom in to the
exerting a force that kept the bead at the beam’s centre. nanoscale. There, whatever you are studying is
Using this force, they slowly dragged the bead through continually bombarded by surrounding molecules,
the water. According to Rudolf Clausius and Lord creating an element of randomness that makes the
Kelvin’s thermodynamics, no matter how many times system jiggle around. This jiggling causes fluctuations
the experiment was repeated, the bead should have in energy and violations of the second law of >

Chapter 2 | The arrow of time | 31

thermodynamics, and even a blurring of the
arrow of time.
These aren’t backward processes in the same way
that a car can be driven backwards in reverse gear.
A backward process is more like a Slinky travelling up a
flight of stairs or a splattered egg reconstituting itself:
impossible at our scale of the world, where time
appears to be firmly set in the forward direction, but
not in the nanoworld. There, time is still inclined to go
forward, but is no longer shackled to just one direction.

SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

This slight preference to going forward at the level of an
individual molecule gradually firms up time’s
thermodynamic arrow as we add more and more
molecules, giving the impression that everything
always runs forward.
Arriving at a time when nanotechnology was starting
to take off commercially, Evans’s 2001 experiment and
its mind-bending consequences catalysed frenzied
work. Scientists derived new fluctuation theorems for
various specialised scenarios as well as generalisations.
They attempted to combine fluctuation theorems with James Clerk Maxwell noted
quantum theory and other research fields. And they that the second law can be
conducted countless experiments violating the second violated at small scales
law that validated the theorems in different settings.
Researchers could immediately see how these
theorems could help them get to grips with the
thermodynamics of small systems, which seemed a
likely coup for nanoscale devices and electronics.
However, it was in the messy world of biophysics – the
study of biological systems with physics where existing
techniques were more limited – that they proved to be a
unique scientific tool. This was thanks to an
experiment to test an idea first proposed in 1997 by
Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland.

32 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Nutrition

“Being able to extract work
from a messy, real-life system
was a huge step forward”
Jarzynski’s equality, as it is now known, is similar in equilibrium. Instead, most systems are in a state
spirit to Evans’s and Bernhardt’s fluctuation theorem, of constant flux, with energy flowing in and out
but with work – the energy a force produces and of them all the time. Being able to extract
transfers to or from an object to move it – replacing practical thermodynamic values like work from
entropy as the quantity of interest. Just as entropy a messy, real-life system out of equilibrium was a
fluctuations were included in the original fluctuation huge step forward.
theorem, Jarzynski incorporated work fluctuations in What’s more, there may be ways to exploit these tools
his. This allowed him to define a way of measuring the on much bigger systems. Building full stochastic
maximum amount of energy that can be freed from a thermodynamic descriptions of ever-bigger living
real-world system to perform useful work: the free systems may provide a picture of how perhaps the
energy difference. most precious phenomenon on Earth manages to keep
To test this equality, a team led by Carlos Bustamante itself constantly out of equilibrium, relentlessly
at the University of California, Berkeley, repeatedly fighting against disorder – life itself. It could pin down
unfolded and refolded a single molecule of RNA. the physics behind cell-level natural selection and
Half of the time they pulled the molecule apart very thereby the origin of life.
slowly, allowing energy and forces to spread evenly at Starting at the molecular level, biophysics
each stage. This allowed them to scrutinise the process researchers have latched onto these tools and
using standard thermodynamics and write down a conducted a swathe of experiments pulling at various
firm value for the free energy difference. biomolecules with some interesting results.
The rest of the time they tugged at the RNA very The aim has been to understand the mechanisms
rapidly, leading to a process whose work could only be underpinning the nanoscale biological equivalents of
analysed using Jarzynski’s equality. Amazingly, the steam engines. Molecular motors are proteins that
values for free energy difference from standard convert available energy into mechanical motion. They
thermodynamics and Jarzynski’s equality agreed. play a fundamental role in various processes essential
The simple, yet elegant demonstration by to life, like muscle contraction, DNA transcription and
Bustamante and his team showed how fluctuation moving materials around cells, such as
theorems and, more generally, stochastic neurotransmitters and hormones.
thermodynamics could be wielded to gain information When it comes to even starting to answer questions
from real-life nanosystems that traditional about the origins and persistence of life, our new
thermodynamics can’t access. understanding of thermodynamics will be crucial. If
Traditional thermodynamics only describes experience so far is anything to go by, you might
systems close to equilibrium, where no energy gamble on it exposing a messy, noisy reality, where
enters or leaves and everything happens smoothly change is governed by random fluctuations that can
and slowly. In the real world, almost nothing is in even bend the rules of time. ❚

Chapter 1 | Basics of nutrition | 33

CHAPTER 3

34 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

When astronomer Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in
the 17th century, a second became firmly established as 1/86,400 of a
solar day, a factor derived from the division of the day into 24 hours,
then 60 minutes per hour and finally 60 seconds per minute.

But Earth isn’t a dependable metronome. The duration of its rotation

varies slightly, meaning a second gradually gets longer. That became a
problem in the early 20th century, when experiments required a
steadier, more precise unit of time.

It eventually arrived with a timepiece that ticks in harmony with the

frequency of radiation emitted from the rapid oscillations inside atoms.
This technology, the atomic clock, remains our best way of measuring
time to this day. But the hunt is on for something that will beat it.

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 35

CLOCKS AND
ENTROPY
As we heard in chapter 2, entropy is what HE flow of time is an enigma; many
physicists even suggest it is just an
many physicists believe creates the arrow illusion. But clock time is our own
of time we perceive. But now, research is invention. We define it by its basic units
– the hours, minutes and seconds that
showing that the very act of measuring time break up the day.
might increase the entropy in the universe. Since astronomer Christiaan Huygens
invented the first pendulum clock in the
17th century, we have been steadily
improving the accuracy of scientific
clocks, with phenomenal results. Nowadays, the most
impressive machines can measure each second so
accurately that they wouldn’t miss a beat in 20 billion
years, longer than the age of the universe. But it turns
out there may be a price to pay for such accuracy.
To produce their ticks, clocks need a source of energy.
A grandfather clock must be wound up and a wall clock
is powered by a battery. The most accurate atomic
clocks, with ticks that correspond to electromagnetic
signals given off by atoms changing energy levels, are
driven by high-powered lasers. This isn’t surprising.
But rather than just requiring energy to run each
mechanical part, new research suggests something
more might be at play: the maximum accuracy of a
clock is directly related to how much disorder, or
entropy, it creates every time it ticks.
This suggests clocks could be a type of so-called
thermodynamic machine. We know of two types of
thermodynamic machine. The first comprises heat
engines – things like fridges and combustion engines –
FRANCESCOCH/ISTOCK which have a maximum efficiency set by >

36 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 37
thermodynamics. The second group encompasses linked to the practical reality of measuring time, then
information storage devices, like DNA and hard discs. thermodynamics could help explain how we perceive
In these, thermodynamics tells us the cost of erasing time after all. What is needed is a direct link between
information. If clocks are a third, it would mean there thermodynamics and practical timekeeping –
are limits on how accurately we can tell the time, due to something explaining why all clocks run in the same
the involvement of energy’s messy cousin, entropy. direction as the entropy increase of the universe. In
The maximum efficiency of heat engines was search of this connection, a handful of researchers are
determined by engineer Sadi Carnot in 1824, before turning to clocks.
entropy was defined. But his calculation paved the way Experiments have shown that clocks become more
for the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, accurate as more energy is supplied to them. Natalia
which says any closed system – something that nothing Ares at the University of Oxford and her colleagues
can enter or leave – will increase in entropy, a measure made this discovery in 2020 using a tiny clock with
of disorder or randomness, over time. accuracy that can be controlled. The clock consisted of
a 50-nanometre-thick membrane of silicon nitride,
←- vibrated by an electric current. Each time the
Turn back to page 24 for more on the second law- membrane moved up and down once and then
returned to its original position, the researchers
Low entropy means high order. If the atoms in a box counted a tick, and the regularity of the spacing
of gas clustered in one corner rather than being spread between the ticks represented the accuracy of the clock.
out chaotically, entropy would be low. But because They found that as they increased the clock’s accuracy,
there are fewer ways for atoms to be ordered than the heat produced in the system grew, increasing the
disordered, making the latter more likely, closed entropy of its surroundings by jostling nearby
systems – like the universe – tend towards disorder. particles.
A cup of hot tea loses heat to its surroundings, raising In this case, you pay for the entropy by pouring
overall entropy, but never spontaneously heats up. more ordered energy into the clock, which is then
This creates an arrow of time. converted into entropy. “By measuring time, we are
increasing the entropy of the universe,” says Ares. The
←- more entropy there is in the universe, the closer it may
For more on entropy and the arrow- be to its eventual demise. The scale of the additional
of time, see chapter 2- entropy is so small, though, that there’s no need to
worry, she says.
The second law is the only law of physics in which The increase in entropy in timekeeping may be
rules are irreversible in time. Because of this, related to the arrow of time. It has been suggested that
thermodynamics is used to explain the arrow of time the reason that time only flows forward, not in reverse,
we perceive. But the second law doesn’t tell the whole is that the total amount of entropy in the universe is
picture. There is still a question of why we only ever constantly increasing, creating disorder that cannot be
experience time moving forwards – many physicists put in order again.
today argue that this is simply an illusion. The relationship that the researchers found is a limit
If the arrow of time in thermodynamics could be on the accuracy of a clock, so it doesn’t mean that a

38 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 clock that creates the most possible entropy would
be maximally accurate – hence a large, inefficient
grandfather clock not being more precise than an
atomic clock. When the researchers compared their
results with theoretical models developed for clocks
that rely on quantum effects, they were surprised to
find that the relationship between accuracy and
entropy seemed to be the same for both.
We can’t be sure yet that these results are universal,
though, because there are many types of clocks for
which the relationship between accuracy and entropy
haven’t been tested. Understanding this relationship
could be helpful for designing clocks in the future,
particularly those used in quantum computers and
other devices where both accuracy and temperature are
crucial. This finding, that there is a link between the
accuracy of a clock and the entropy produced, could
also help us understand more generally how the
quantum world and the classical world are similar and
different in terms of thermodynamics and the passage
of time.
And not all clocks entirely follow the rules, it would
seem. The most accurate atomic clocks appear more
efficient than the research predicts. These clocks
involve complex circuits, detectors and feedback,
making their energy flow difficult to model.
The link between clocks and thermodynamics may
also reflect time on a smaller scale. If there is a limit on
how accurately we can resolve time, could this be a sign
that time itself isn’t perfectly smooth, but instead
lumpy – packed into tiny units in the same way that
light comes in photons?
Answering this could be tricky. To probe space-time
at this tiniest of scales, below those we can currently
reach with our best particle accelerators, would require
ROBERTSROB/ISTOCK

vast amounts of energy. At a certain level of energy, you

would expect to create a black hole that would swallow
the entire experiment, suggesting it is impossible to
resolve time perfectly. ❚

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 39

TIMEKEEPING: A TIMELINE
We can measure time using anything that goes through a change – sundials use the shifting sun, water clocks
tap the flow of water and even the temperature of a cup of tea can help us estimate when it was brewed. Today,
we mostly use sophisticated mechanical and atomic clocks, which can measure time much more accurately than
a cup of tea, because they tick reliably with a certain frequency, but they were a long time coming.

3000 BC: governed by two forces: the gravity 1955. It was accurate to 1 second every
acting on the weight and the force of the 300 years, meaning two such clocks
SOLSTICE MARKER
string pulling on the weight. The idea would fall out of sync by just one second
A method used by ancient humans. An every three centuries.
was proposed by Galileo, but the first
artificial hill with a vaulted central pendulum clock was built by Christiaan
chamber can only be reached by a Huygens. Within a couple of decades of
1967:
narrow passage. It is aligned so that the this invention, pendulum clocks would THE SECOND
rising sun casts a ray into the narrow only gain or lose one minute over the REDEFINED
passage on the winter solstice – this is course of a year. In 1967, representatives at the 13th
the only time of the year that the General Conference on Weights and
chamber gets any light. 19TH C ENTU RY: Measures in Paris officially redefined the
THE SECOND
1500 BC: second as “the duration of 9,192,631,770
In 1832, Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed periods of the radiation corresponding to
SUNDIAL
using the second as the base unit of time. the transition between the two hyperfine
A sundial measures the passage of time Then, in 1862, it was officially adopted by levels of the ground state of the
using the motion of the sun across the the British Association for the caesium-133 atom”.
sky. As the sun moves from east to west, Advancement of Science. They wrote
the shadow of a sundial moves from that: “All men of science are agreed to
1970 S:
west to east. It takes a full day for the use the second of mean solar time as the D I G I TA L
shadow to move back to the same unit of time.” S T O P W AT C H
position. The world’s first electronic digital
E A R LY 20TH C E NTU RY:
600 BC: R E L AT I V I T Y
watches were introduced. Most digital
stopwatches measure time by counting
W AT E R C L O C K S The discovery that the speed of light is a the predictable oscillations of a quartz
One of the oldest instruments used to constant led to a revolution in the way we crystal. The crystal will pulse many
measure time, water clocks measure thought of what time means. Einstein’s thousands of times a second and the final
time by tapping the flow of water from a theories of special and general relativity count is converted into seconds with
vessel. describe time as relative: people moving decimal places, in a format known as a
relative to one another and in different
L ATE 17TH C ENTU RY:
floating-point representation.
places will see different amounts of time
NAUTICAL ALMANACS pass. Space and time play off against
2000S:
Using Newtonian physics, physicists each other in profound ways. OPTICAL
could predict the orbit of the moon. AT O M I C C L O C K
Allowing measurements of the moon in 1940 S: The tick of an atomic clock is measured
the night sky relative to the stars to THE SOLAR SECOND by the frequency of radiation emitted
reveal the time meant the moon could be The second was officially defined as when electrons around an atom change
used as a clock. 1/86,400 of a solar day. energy states. Older atomic clocks
tracked atoms that vibrate at microwave
1656: 1955: frequencies, while the latest generation
PENDULUM CLOCK M I C R O W AV E AT O M I C use even faster optical frequencies. The
This was a revolution in mechanical CLOCK best ones measure time with an error of
timekeeping. In a pendulum clock, time is The first microwave atomic clock was only 1 in 1 billion billion: after ticking for
marked by the swinging of a large, heavy unveiled at the National Physical 32 billion years, they would be just 1
weight. The motion of the pendulum is Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, UK, in second off. ❚
THE INCREDIBLY SLOW
RACE TO REINVENT TIME
The latest atomic clocks are so staggeringly N 1967, the second was official redefined using a
microwave atomic clock accurate to 1 second
precise that they are going to redefine the every 300 years. These work by driving an
second. The only question now is when. electron to bounce between two energy states
within an atom, in this case caesium-133, and
counting the number of bounces.
It is a time standard that persists today, even
if the accuracy of microwave atomic clocks has
improved to the point that the best caesium
clocks now keep time with an accuracy of
1 second in roughly 300 million years. And it is a
measure that has served us well. The steady backbeat of
the caesium atom’s vibration underpins all manner of
modern technologies, from GPS and smartphones to
the internet and electricity grids, all of which require
exquisitely precise synchronisation.
But it is no longer the best we can do – not by a long
way. Many researchers are working on optical atomic
clocks, a new generation of timepieces that promise to
once again dramatically improve the precision with
which we can measure time passing.
We have known for a long time that other atoms
oscillate much faster than caesium. Strontium and
ytterbium stand out because the electrons surrounding
their nuclei have stable excited states, relatively
unperturbed by potentially disruptive outside forces >

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 41

like temperature and electric and magnetic fields. The tricky because, as well as an optical frequency comb, it
problem was always that their electrons transition requires a separate piece of hardware called an optical-
between energy levels so fast that there was no easy to-electrical converter to transform pulses of light into
way to count them. an electric signal. For a long time, it wasn’t clear that it
That wrinkle was smoothed out in 1999 with a device was possible to translate the exquisite timing produced
called an optical frequency comb, which essentially by optical clocks into the microwave frequency range
translates the atomic oscillations measured in the for use in electronics. But, in 2020, researchers cracked
optical range into microwave frequencies. For the first the problem.
time, the rates at which optical clocks “tick” could be Metrologists are now discussing the idea of
calibrated against one another and the standard set by submitting a proposal to vote on an official redefinition
the caesium atom. at the next General Conference on Weights and
The technique sparked something of an arms race, Measures, scheduled for 2026. To make that happen,
with labs around the world competing to create ever the field must first negotiate a few obstacles. For
more precise optical clocks. Currently, top contenders starters, metrologists will have to decide on the cut-off
include ytterbium clocks and strontium clocks. These point, a level of precision that everyone agrees is
optical clocks have already achieved a level of certainty enough for redefinition. Once that’s settled, they will
nearly two orders of magnitude higher than caesium- have to thrash out which kind of optical atomic clock
based clocks, to the point that most would lose a second should be used to set the official redefinition. There are
only once over the course of the entire history of the at least 10 different models being developed in labs
universe. around the world, and no single candidate has yet
That might seem like overkill. Wrist watches and emerged as an obvious best choice.
iPhones don’t need to operate to a precision of 18 digits The clocks differ not only in the types of atoms being
or more. Yet if they can be made sufficiently portable, used, but also in their architectures. One leading
optical atomic clocks could be used for all sorts of design, the optical lattice clock, measures the
practical purposes, from tracking movement to oscillations of about 10,000 neutral atoms
detecting volcanic activity and the risk of earthquakes. simultaneously to provide stable, snappy readings.
They are also likely to usher in many technologies and Other candidates include the single-trapped-ion clock,
breakthroughs that we haven’t thought of yet – and which measures the transition frequency of a single
that is before we even get onto the fundamental isolated, charged atom in a way that can help to reduce
questions in physics that more accurate timepieces uncertainty. The problem with single-atom clocks is
would help resolve. that they deliver a smaller signal than lattice clocks and
If optical clocks have already achieved such record- thus take more time to produce measurements.
breaking precision, why isn’t the world already ticking Eventually, one must be crowned the winner. This
to their superior beat? The trouble is that there is a decision will ultimately fall to the board of
checklist of knotty problems to be addressed before a representatives at the General Conference on Weights
new international time standard can be established. and Measures; its conclusion will be based on the
For one thing, you need to pair the signals coming recommendation reached by numerous experts,
from optical atomic clocks with all the electronic committees, working groups and subgroups.
infrastructure already in place, which is currently Ultimately, naming a final winner will probably be
synchronised using microwave-based clocks. That is more of a human problem than a scientific one. ❚

42 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 ATOMIC CLOCKS
AND BEYOND
Atomic clocks are so precise they would only lose or gain a second over billions of
years. Despite this jaw-dropping precision, researchers around the world are working
to find ways to beat it. The hope is that building the ultimate clock could allow us to
further test the laws of physics.

ATOMIC
CLOCKS
The most accurate clocks we have are atomic clocks.
These work by exploiting the fact that an atom of
caesium, or some other element, emits visible light or
microwaves when one of its electrons drops from a
high energy state to a lower one. Tuning a laser to just
the right frequency lets researchers bounce an electron
between two of these energy levels. It is this frequency
that serves as the tick of an atomic clock.
Most atomic clocks rely on the frequency of the
RICHARD KAIL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

microwave radiation emitted when electrons in

caesium-133 atoms change energy states. Next-
generation clocks that use strontium atoms have at
least three times the precision, barely gaining or losing
a second over 15 billion years. Yet this is not enough for
many physicists.

MOLECULAR
The nucleus of a thorium atom
could make a useful clock
CLOCKS
A clock that ticks using vibrations of strontium
molecules could be used to test Albert Einstein’s theory
of relativity or to search for forces that have yet to be
described.
Though ultracold molecules – made of multiple
atoms – have been proposed as ingredients for even
more reliable and stable clocks, they have historically >

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 43

proven very difficult to control. In 2023, Kon Leung at like the two atoms in each strontium molecule.
Columbia University in New York and his colleagues If these forces existed, some might reveal themselves
built an unprecedentedly accurate clock out of by causing irregularities in the clock’s ticking.
ultracold molecules of strontium.
To make the molecular clock, the researchers
cooled strontium atoms to two-millionths of a degree QUANTUM
above absolute zero in a small, airless metal and glass
container. They then used lasers to pair the atoms into
STOPWATCH
molecules that were arranged into a line. Under these A quantum stopwatch made of lasers and helium
circumstances, the strontium molecules only have atoms can measure the time that has passed with
enough energy to repeatedly move their two atoms complete accuracy, without counting seconds like
towards and away from each other at a predictable rate. other clocks. In other words, a quantum watch can tell
A “tick” of the clock is one full movement back time without counting it.
and forth. In 2022, Marta Berholts at Uppsala University in
This ultracold ticking was so steady that, when used for Sweden and her colleagues based the clock on a type of
timekeeping, it would take about a million years for the experiment called a pump-probe experiment. In these
clock’s impeccable rhythm to drift by a whole second, an tests, a “pump” laser pulse is sent into a cloud of atoms,
error one-tenth that of other molecular clocks. raising them to higher energy levels, and then another,
As molecular clocks improve, they could become less powerful “probe” pulse is used to measure the
valuable for testing Einstein’s theory of relativity by effect of the pump.
comparing them with atomic clocks. According to To make their quantum stopwatch, the researchers
Einstein, the flow of time can be influenced by first fired a laser beam into a cloud of helium atoms. This
gravitational forces, but the timekeeping method a put the atoms into a superposition of quantum states,
clock uses shouldn’t have any influence on how this meaning that they were in multiple energy levels at once.
time dilation is experienced. These energy levels interact with one another – like how,
For instance, if put into microgravity onboard a in the famous double-slit experiment, a single photon
satellite, an atomic clock and a molecular clock should can go through two openings at the same time – and
similarly register the relatively faster flow of time in create an interference pattern that changes over time.
orbit. If the two types of clocks don’t react similarly to When the researchers measured that interference
the change in gravity and drift apart over time, that pattern for as little as 1.7 trillionths of a second, they could
result would be in conflict with Einstein’s theory. compare it to simulations of the interference and find
The molecular clock could also be used to look for the unique slice of time where the patterns matched,
undescribed forces. Some proposed possible forces telling them precisely how long the helium atoms had
only act between objects that are very close together, been in the superposition. The non-repeating nature of

44 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

the interference pattern made it easy to prove whether they would be more accurate than atomic
without a doubt that the timing was accurate. rivals was unclear. The exact frequency needed to
Unlike with a traditional clock, there is no need to excite a nucleus depends on the configuration of its
measure exactly when the atoms were put into a orbiting electrons, which can vary.
superposition. It won’t be useful in measuring time In 2023, Sandro Kraemer at Ludwig Maximilian
more generally, but in experiments where all that University of Munich in Germany and his colleagues
needs to be measured is a delay between two times, pinned the frequency down. Ordinarily, thorium is a
it could be extraordinarily accurate. billion times more likely to emit an electron than a
This stopwatch-like method of observing quantum photon, but, by embedding the nuclei in a crystal lattice
experiments is a deceptively simple – and always of calcium and magnesium fluoride, the team was able
accurate – way to measure the passage of time. to change the odds. With the ability to produce photons
over electrons, the researchers could measure this flash
of light precisely enough to determine its frequency
NUCLEAR with seven times less uncertainty than previous
CLOCKS measurements. It is this frequency that would be needed
to fire a laser at a thorium nucleus to make a clock.
In 2023 the discovery of an elusive flash of light from To produce the radioactive thorium, which doesn’t
the nucleus of the element thorium, which physicists occur in nature, Kraemer and his team fired protons
have been hunting for decades, brought us a step closer into a uranium target at a facility at the CERN particle
to building a nuclear clock: the most precise timepiece physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to
in the cosmos. produce a beam of radioactive actinium ions. They
A nuclear clock has not yet been made but the idea then fired actinium ions into calcium and magnesium
would be to use the atomic nucleus like a tuning fork. A fluoride crystals, where they then decayed into photon-
nucleus will jump to a higher energy state, then fall producing radioactive thorium nuclei.
back down, and jump up again, only if it is hit with a We now know the energy levels of the thorium
very specific frequency of light. Tuning a laser so that it nucleus almost well enough to build a working nuclear
prompts these jumps is a way to set its frequency with a clock, and there are research groups already trying to
phenomenal level of precision. The frequency can then construct a laser that can excite the nucleus – but the
be used like a clock’s tick to keep time. final hurdle might involve years of fine-tuning the
In particular, the nucleus of radioactive thorium has frequency to the perfect pitch. If successful, a nuclear
an unusually small gap between energy levels that clock could tell us about the inner workings of nuclei
would make for an extraordinarily accurate clock and and probe for discrepancies in the universe’s
would also teach us more about the inner workings of fundamental forces, as well as improve on the already
the nuclei. The idea was first proposed in 2003, but incredibly precise atomic clocks in existence. ❚

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 45

INTERVIEW

WHAT USE IS THE WORLD’S

MOST ACCURATE CLOCK?
The most advanced atomic clocks don’t just How do you make an atomic clock?
People have made atomic clocks for many decades.
tell time. Jun Ye says they could soon get so The traditional way is to shine microwaves onto atoms,
ludicrously accurate that they could be used such as caesium or rubidium, to make their electrons
flip from one quantum state – known as spin – to
for detecting gravitational waves and testing another at regular intervals. This flipping is the tick of
the limits of relativity. the clock.
In the clocks I make, the principle is the same. But we
use laser light and shine it on strontium atoms, so
electrons undergo energy transitions between two
stable orbitals – and that’s the tick.

PROFILE How good is your clock?

JUN YE There are three important performance metrics. First:
how precise is your clock, or how well can you measure
time? Second: how reproducible is it? This refers to
A quantum scientist at the JILA
whether you can get the same kind of measurement
research institute in Boulder, after a day, a week, a year. Third: how accurate is it? Is it
Colorado, Jun Ye has been a time that everyone can agree upon, after all
working for 20 years on systematic effects have been properly accounted for?
precision metrology and, in This is quite different from precision. If we wanted to
particular, atomic clocks. In use these clocks as a standard for time, and we had one
clock in Boulder and one in London, then they’d need
2022, he won the Breakthrough
to agree.
Prize in Fundamental Physics In terms of precision, our clock is a mind-boggling
for the invention and 100,000 times better than the best microwave-based
development of the optical atomic clock. It’s been a tremendous improvement
lattice clock. over the past 20 years. The clock is highly reproducible
too. What’s less clear, so far, is how well different clocks
will agree.

46 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 LIFETOUCH INC.
G.E. MARTI, YE LABS/JILA

Jun Ye’s strontium atomic

clock is the most precise in
the world

Is it true your clock would only drop a second kilometres using satellites and airplanes. There was a
in the lifetime of the universe? remarkable experiment by my colleague Dave
We’re dealing with time intervals so small they are hard Wineland in 2010 using clocks 33 centimetres apart and
to grasp. Back in 2015, we did some calculations and seeing dilation. Recently, we measured time dilation
converted the precision of the clock to a more over a few hundred microns [millionths of a metre]
understandable value. It came out as being precise to with our strontium clock.
within 1 second in 14 billion years, which is the lifetime I think we need to go down further, so we can see
of the universe. Since then, the precision of the clock time dilation over a few microns. This is where things
has got better – so now it is 1 second in multiple get interesting. We’d potentially be able to see how
universe lifetimes. things like entanglement [an intrinsic link particles
can share after interacting] are affected by different
Why make clocks this precise? curvatures in Earth’s gravitational field.
There are many secrets in the universe, many mysteries
out there. It seems we’re missing something Is there a limit to how accurate clocks will get?
fundamental about the way reality works. One way to try The universe is always singing this symphony of
and get answers is to do experiments with particle gravitational waves borne out of collisions of black
colliders involving higher and higher energy. For that, holes and such like. If your clock gets so precise that it
you’d need about $40 billion and 30 years to construct can no longer be shielded from this omnipresent
yet another machine to smash particles, which isn’t gravitational wave background, that will be the end of
guaranteed to see something new. Precision clocks are a the road for the atomic clock. This is still many decades
totally different and more accessible tool that will also away, though.
allow us to search for new fundamental physics. One key We don’t have to see this as a limitation. Clocks can
area, for example, is time dilation on very small scales. If potentially function as a new kind of detector for
we can study this, it might tell us something new about gravitational waves, a different way of observing them.
the connection between quantum physics and gravity. One day we could have a network of clocks orbiting
Earth, serving as a planet-scale antenna for gravitational
You recently used your clocks to measure time dilation. waves. This might be able to pinpoint waves with
When people first started to test if time dilation [the sufficient precision that it could allow us to hear the
idea that clocks can experience time ticking at different echoes of the big bang from the edge of the universe.
speeds] was real, they compared clocks separated by If we could get to that level, it would be fascinating. ❚

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 47

PROFILE
NICOLE
YUNGER
HALPERN
Nicole Yunger Halpern,
runs arguably the best-
named research group
in the universe: The
Quantum-Steampunk
Laboratory. Her work
involves re-envisioning
thermodynamics for the
quantum age.

48 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 ESSAY

CAN WE BUILD A CLOCK

THAT IS ENTIRELY QUANTUM?
Quantum clocks are normally controlled by a classical control system, but to build things like tiny
quantum drones that deliver molecules, we’ll need to go beyond classical, says Nicole Yunger Halpern

LOCKS regulate our lives, dictating quantum drone interacted with ordinary devices,
when we sleep and wake, whether the more its entanglement could dissipate.
we catch our flights home and who The question is, can we build such a quantum clock
wins a fortune on Wall Street. And just that would do the job?
as clocks govern us, they govern Before we dive in, I should clarify that an
quantum devices. autonomous quantum clock is not the same as the so-
Take quantum computers. A basic called atomic clocks that you can buy in stores. My
part of performing any computation grandparents bought such an “atomic clock” and hung
is executing certain tasks at certain it in their kitchen, but theirs would have been more
times. External classical control accurately called a “radio-controlled clock”. Every day,
systems keep time for today’s quantum computers, but the clock received radio signals from a Colorado
a control system that could operate entirely within the outpost of the National Institute of Standards and
quantum realm would open up new possibilities. Technology (NIST), synchronising it with a highly
Giving our imaginations free rein, we might envision accurate clock operated by NIST.
tiny quantum drones that can tinker with or deliver NIST’s clock was an actual atomic clock – a quantum
molecules. Such autonomous machines would have to clock, but one whose controller didn’t exist entirely
carry their own clocks and those clocks would have to within the quantum realm. An atomic clock contains
WILDPIXEL/ISTOCK

be quantum too to prevent the machines from losing atoms that can absorb only certain amounts of energy
their quantum character. For instance, quantum in discrete packets – like someone who can eat one
technologies benefit from entanglement, strong packet of crisps but not half a packet. A laser shines on
correlations that sync quantum particles. The more a the atoms, and an external controller measures how >

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 49

many atoms have, so to speak, eaten crisp packets from energy, position and momentum. But quantum
the laser. If many atoms have, then the laser’s light position and momentum participate in an uncertainty
consists of particles with just the right amount of relation. If a quantum particle has a well-defined
energy – an amount calculable with quantum theory. position, the particle doesn’t have a well-defined
In addition to consisting of particles, the light has wave- momentum; in quantum lingo, the particle is in a
like properties and so, in a sense, oscillates up and superposition of all possible momenta. If you measure
down. The time between oscillations is a calculable the momentum, your detector can read any positive
fraction of a second, which is defined in terms of the number, any negative number or zero. Analogous to
energy that the atoms can absorb. So we measure a the particle’s well-defined position is an ideal quantum
second by waiting for the laser light to oscillate a clock’s well-defined time; the clock would not be in a
certain number of times. The controller that measures superposition of many times.
the atoms’ energy isn’t quantum, so an atomic clock is But time and energy participate in an uncertainty
not the only clock we’ll need for the quantum relation similarly to position and momentum. So a
steampunk age. quantum system with a well-defined time would be in a
Quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli spent time superposition of all possible energies. Moreover, the
in the 1920s thinking about quantum clocks, among superposition would be spread evenly across all
many other things. Pauli’s interests extended from possible energies: if you measured the clock’s energy,
quantum physics to psychology and philosophy, and your probability of obtaining one possible outcome
his name is now tied to the Pauli exclusion principle would equal your probability of obtaining any other
that governs how electrons organise in atoms. He possible outcome.
homed in on simple, yet fundamental concepts – and Pauli proved mathematically that no quantum
what is time, if not fundamental? system can have a time observable. If a system did, it
Pauli pointed out that an ideal quantum clock has a could have an infinitely negative amount of energy.
time “observable”. Observable is the physics name for a Having an infinitely negative amount of energy is
measurable property of a quantum system. Example impossible in our world. So, according to quantum
observables include energy, position and momentum. mechanics, our world doesn’t accommodate time
An ideal quantum clock’s time observable has a well- observables – or ideal quantum clocks.
defined value. How could an observable not have a Luckily, we don’t need an ideal quantum clock – a
well-defined value? After all, you have a well-defined good-enough quantum clock could be, well, good

50 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

“You may as well gaze at
a grandfather clock with
increasingly blurry glasses”

enough. Just how drawing a round shape on a piece Reading the time off a quantum clock wouldn’t
of paper can approximate a circle, so too can a interfere with timekeeping if the clock were ideal. But
quantum clock approximate an ideal one. And three an imperfect clock would degrade with use, reducing
colleagues of mine – Jonathan Oppenheim, Mischa our ability to distinguish instants. You might as well
Woods and Ralph Silva – have managed to design such gaze at a grandfather clock through increasingly blurry
a quantum clock. glasses: 6 o’clock will blend into 5.59 and 6.01, then into
As Jonathan and Mischa explained to me when I 5.58 and 6.02. Disturbances also hinder the clock’s
visited them in London one spring, their theoretical ability to initiate processes, such as logic gates in a
clock is in an approximation to the ideal time state, the computation, at desired times.
superposition spread evenly across all energies. Their How well could Mischa, Ralph and Jonathan’s clock
superposition is spread unevenly in a particular withstand such disturbances? Not too poorly, you could
pattern: if you measure the clock’s energy, you’re more say, if channelling my Britain-based colleagues.
likely to obtain some outcomes than others. So the Imagine growing the clock – adding particles to it,
clock’s energy is still uncertain, just not maximally although not so many particles that the clock loses its
uncertain. The clock therefore doesn’t break the laws of quantum nature. The bigger the clock, the greater its
physics à la Pauli. resilience. And giving a little gets you a lot: as the clock
Moreover, the clock is fairly stable. Reading a grows, its resilience grows exponentially.
quantum clock is not like reading a classical one. The So far, such properties remain theoretical, and
act of using it to determine the time would trigger a scientists are hard-pressed to build even externally
counterintuitive quantum phenomenon: controlled quantum computers, let alone autonomous
measurement disturbance. You can observe an ones. But experiments’ control over quantum systems
everyday clock without affecting which time it reports, has advanced rapidly over the past three decades and
just as a police officer can register your car’s speed shows no signs of slowing down. Will autonomous
without your noticing (hence the existence of speeding clocks enable quantum computers and other machines
tickets). But quantum systems are more delicate than to operate independently? Whether measured on a
everyday systems. If you measure a quantum system – quantum clock or an everyday one, time will tell. ❚
or interact with it any other way – you disturb it,
changing its state. If you measure the system’s energy, →-
you’ll likely change its energy. Chapter 5 has more on quantum time-

Chapter 3 | Measuring time | 51

CHAPTER 4

52 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

The way we experience time is almost as mysterious as the essence
of time itself. Most of us can estimate time passing with amazing
precision thanks to a complex network of neural mechanisms. In fact,
the way we process time has led some to suggest we even create the
arrow of time in our brains.

Our bodies can keep track of time unconsciously, too. This relationship
between our bodies and our sense of time contributes to our perception
of time slowing down and speeding up. But this is far from the only
factor at play in weaving together our experience of how time passes.

Chapter 4 | Perceiving time | 53

THE BODY’S
METRONOMES
The ability of our bodies to sync up with the world around us is vital to
physical and mental health. Just how it achieves this feat is a co-ordinated
effort between body and brain.

VEN in the absence of clocks, schedules larks, preferring to rise early and retire early, while owls
and calendars, our bodies still march to find it difficult to function in the morning but thrive
the beat of internal timekeepers called late at night. These “chronotypes” are largely
circadian rhythms. This innate evolved determined by genes, but most of us fall somewhere in
connection to the spinning of Earth on its the middle.
axis ensures that biological processes That doesn’t mean our body clocks are totally fixed,
occur at the right time of day or night, as they can be nudged forwards by exposure to bright
and is vital for our health. Not only light in the early morning, though some people’s clocks
will various organs work optimally at are more resistant to resetting than others. This might
certain times, but the way our bodies explain why some people are more susceptible to jetlag
respond to medicines and our likelihood of developing and find it harder to adapt to shift work than others.
certain diseases is all tightly connected to whether our Age can also cause profound shifts in your body clock:
bodies are operating in time with the physical world older people tend to sleep less and wake earlier.
around us. Orchestrating all of this is the brain. Let’s start with
How does the body keep track of this clock? Light hits “time cells”. These reside in the hippocampus – a region
specialised cells on the retinas in our eyes that send involved in learning and memory – and were first
signals about the time of day to a master clock in the discovered in rats in 2018. Recently, time cells were also
brain. This, in turn, regulates a multitude of clocks identified in humans by Bradley Lega at the University
ticking in cells and organs throughout the body, of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and his
keeping us working as a coordinated whole. Over each colleagues.
24-hour period, we experience cycles of physical and To understand what time cells do, first we need to
mental changes that are thought to prepare our brains consider “place cells” – brain cells that mark where in a
and bodies for the tasks we’re likely to encounter at spatial environment an animal is. If the animal walks
certain times of the day. along a linear tunnel, place cells would fire in a linear
Not surprisingly, our physical and mental states vary manner. Time cells do something similar, but for the
widely with the time of day. For example, core body passage of time.
temperature is at its lowest at around 4.30 am, rises When you are at an event – a movie or a dinner party,
through the day and peaks at around 7 pm. Adrenalin for instance – your brain will recognise this as a specific,
levels also rise throughout the day. Not everyone or notable, chunk of time that neuroscientists call an
follows the same pattern, though. Some people are “episode”. In many cases, our brains know how long >

54 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

WILDPIXEL/ISTOCK

Chapter 4 | Perceiving time | 55

 How long does a dog
year really feel to our
canine friends?

each episode is likely to be. Armed with this knowledge,

each time cell will fire in different windows during each
episode. One might fire after 10 seconds, another at 2 HOW DO
minutes, and so on.
Time cells might explain why certain experiences ANIMALS
feel like they happen faster than others. The subjective
experience of time may depend on how many episodes SENSE TIME?
you are creating, and the detail you assign to each one.
In an intense experience, your brain might create There is one dog year to every seven human
multiple episodes with many time cells associated with years, so the saying goes. But does that
many events, making time appear to slow down. mean one dog year feels like seven?
To track the passing of time, we may also need Research suggests that time perception
“ramping cells”. Whereas time cells wait until it is their varies across all animals, and that their body
turn to fire, a ramping cell will fire intensely to mark mass and metabolic rate are the determining
the beginning of an episode, then gradually slow down. factors. To investigate, Kevin Healy, whilst at
So how do we stitch together the passage of time? Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and his
The brain combines information from place cells about colleagues used a technique called critical
where an event is happening and sensory information flicker fusion frequency, which measures the
about what is going on – what a person’s perfume was, speed at which the eye can process a
what they were talking about. Then, add in the time and flashing light before it sees it as constantly
ramping cell activity and the brain can put all the on. Healy’s team found that smaller animals
information into the appropriate time frame. This data perceive time as if it is passing in slow
is packaged up into episodic memories and stored, motion because they see more information
allowing us to perceive the temporal order of our lives. in 1 second than larger mammals such as an
This is the leading theory. But there may be other elephant. Further analysis showed that a
mechanisms involved, too. Theta rhythms – waves of high metabolism and small body size were
brain activity that oscillate at around 4 to 8 hertz – may also associated with the ability to take in
INSIDE-STUDIO/ISTOCK

also timestamp activities, depending on where within more information and thereby sensing time
the wave they occur. “There’s one model proposed in passing more slowly.
which theta oscillations are happening in multiple
places in the hippocampus and where other neurons
fire relative to this wave can provide the mechanism to
piece together when something happened,” says Lega.
“Some researchers believe the brain can tell time
without time and ramping cells entirely.” ❚

56 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

DO OUR BRAINS
CREATE TIME’S
ARROW?
UR brains have a complex assortment
We all feel the passing of time, but nothing
of neural machinery tasked with
in physics suggests it is a fundamental imposing temporal order. Put this way,
the brain can seem like a Victorian
property of the universe. So where does our
clock-maker’s workshop, stuffed with
sense of time’s flow come from? all manner of contraptions, each
designed to measure a different aspect
of time.
There is the master circadian clock in
the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which
relies on pendulum-like oscillations inside proteins to
keep us in sync with the rhythms of the sun. Then there
are collections of brain cells that govern the sub-second
timing for quick-fire physical reactions.
Yet neither of these can account for the familiar sense
that time passes, or that we pass through events as if
being dragged along by a current. “Our experience of
the world depends on the ordering of what we interpret
as events and causalities, and they take place over
seconds and minutes and hours,” says Edvard Moser at
the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Norway.
The brain marks out what happens when in real time to
create episodic memories, without which there would
be no past to recall and no sense of time’s passage. To
understand how that works, says Moser, “you have to
understand how the brain makes sequences”.
Moser and May-Britt Moser, also at the Kavli
Institute, won a share of the 2014 Nobel prize in
medicine for their role in the discovery of “grid cells”
that track rats’ position in space to create a
navigational map in the brain. Then, in 2020,
Bradley Lega at the University of Texas Southwestern
Medical Center and his colleagues found equivalent
cells for the arrangement of events in time. The idea
fits nicely with the local neural landscape. >

Chapter 4 | Perceiving time | 57

 The medial entorhinal cortex, where grid cells live, some neurons are capable of encoding both: grid cells,
sends signals directly into the neighbouring for example, seem to signal elapsed time in rats
hippocampus, where the time cells were found. This is running on treadmills.
the centre of memory formation. So it is here, the There is even some suggestion that perceptions of
Mosers suggest, that representations of space and time motion warp our perception of time. Many
from specialist cells come together to create our unified experiments have demonstrated the Kappa effect, for
experience of what, where and when. instance, when people overestimate the amount of
But it also invites the question: what sort of time do time between two repeated visual stimuli as the
our brains mark out? It is not clock time. Clocks are a physical space between them grows. Researchers have
cultural invention, after all, and clock time is also shown that when people are themselves in
presumably not something neurons have evolved to motion, their perception of the duration of a given
track. Intuitively, the time we perceive does seems to be stimulus is elongated.
some “master clock” outside the universe. That said, motion and spatial scale are far from the
only things that warp time. We have all felt it: time flies
→- when you are having fun and drags when you are
The essay on page 62 has more ideas on the- bored. Most dramatically, time seems to go into super-
brain and our construct of time- slow motion when you are gripped by fear, as in a near-
death experience or even a minor car accident. At first
It appears to proceed at a regular rate, providing the approximation, focus appears to be the big factor. The
backdrop against which neurons track sequences of less occupied we are, the more we pay attention to
events. In evolutionary terms, it is difficult to see why time’s passing – and thus it feels as if it is slipping by
the time we experience would be anything other than more slowly. But there is more to it than that.
clock time, because it is hard to see how the ability to In one of the best-known time-perception
perceive that motion and gravity warp space and time experiments, David Eagleman, now at Stanford
brings a fitness advantage. We happen to live in a University in California, and Vani Pariyadath at the
gravitational field of moderate strength and we go National Institute on Drug Abuse in Maryland, had
about our lives at roughly the same low speeds, so our volunteers fall backwards off a tower into a safety net
senses haven’t been under pressure to develop the suspended 30 metres below. As they plummeted, they
ability to perceive the odd things time does in Einstein’s looked at a wrist-worn LED display showing a flickering
theories of relativity. number that alternated with its negative image 20
Except there are reasons to suspect that we do times a second. This is far too fast for humans to
perceive some Einsteinian aspects of time, primarily its perceive unless time can somehow slow down in our
intimate relationship with space. In that sense, time for brain at certain moments. Although the volunteers did
us depends as much on motion as it does in Einstein’s report that the drop lasted longer than the actual time
relativity. There is evidence of this “spatialisation of it took, none of them was able to discern the number.
time” in how we talk about time, for example in how This led Eagleman and Pariyadath to suggest that the
language can shape the flow of time. time expansion was an artefact of memory: intense
situations cause our brains to soak up more sensory
→- detail, laying down a richer memory, which explains
For more on time and language, turn to page 64- why the experience seems to have lasted longer than it
really did.
Brain imaging studies have indicated that But we also know that in certain situations, time
representations of space and time are generated in the dilation can occur in real time. Time may sometimes
same regions as each other. And there are hints that seem slower than it is because part of our brain

58 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

becomes fatigued. In an experiment in 2020, The theory of “embodied cognition” says it is the
Masamichi Hayashi at Osaka University in Japan and processing of physical sensations that creates our
his colleagues wanted to determine if there was a perception of the world around us, including our sense
neural basis for our subjective sense of time. They of time. The body has numerous rhythms, after all –
focused their efforts on the brain’s supramarginal from the beating of the heart to the hunger in our
gyrus (SMG) after reading reports on how people with stomach – that might all give the brain a sense of how
damage in that part of the brain had an impaired sense much time has passed.
of time. We know that the brain integrates our bodily signals
The researchers scanned the brains of 20 people, with in a region known as the insula, located deep in the
an average age of 21, as they were shown a quick brain between the frontal and temporal lobes. This is
succession of grey circles on a screen. The circles were essential for our sense of self and the construction of
used to manipulate the participants’ sense of time. conscious experience, which must include some sense
Some participants only saw each circle for 250 of time passing.
milliseconds, whereas others saw them for 750ms. Wittmann has shown, for example, that people who
After this, each person was shown another grey circle, are more aware of their heartbeat reproduce the
followed by a loud beep for 500ms. These circles duration of a sound they have just heard more
appeared for either 350, 450, 550 or 650ms and the accurately than others. It looked like they were using
participants were asked to judge whether this time their bodies’ signals to gauge how much time had
period was shorter or longer than the beep. passed. He has also demonstrated that when people
Participants who initially saw the grey circles for watch horror films and time slows, it feels as if it runs
250ms overestimated how long the new circle was on slower still when the volunteers are encouraged to
screen, while the other group underestimated it. These focus on their bodily sensations.
findings were reflected in the brain scans, which According to this idea, anything that directs more
showed that the participants who reported bigger time attention to our bodies should make time seem to slow.
distortions had a greater reduction in the activity of the This might explain why time crawls when we are
SMG. Hayashi speculates that this is because the first hungry or cold. “If you don’t have distraction, you start
phase of the experiment fatigued the time-sensitive attending to your bodily self,” says Wittmann, “and
neurons in the SMG, making them less likely to fire as time drags.” If you focus your attention on something
they became tuned to repeated stimuli. else, you are no longer listening so intently to those
But this distortion of time can also happen during bodily signals, and time seems to speed up.
times of heightened emotion. Marc Wittmann at the All of which suggests that heart rate, or more likely a
Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental sum of various bodily states, could serve as an intrinsic
Health in Freiburg, Germany, and his colleagues measure of duration. The number of accumulated
simulated the experience of a threatening scenario pulses would represent the amount of time that has
such as a car accident. Participants were shown circles passed, and the brain would record them. In which case,
on a screen, some of which grew larger to suggest they we get the impression that time is moving more slowly
were approaching and some shrunk as if they were than it is when bodily processes ramp up.
receding. Sure enough, when faced with the That makes more sense in the framework of
approaching circle, people overestimated the amount Newtonian time than it does in the context of the
of time that passed. relative space and time conceived by Einstein.
So, the warping of felt time is as much about emotion Ultimately, however, our ability to sense and warp time
as anything else. When you scratch the surface of doesn’t require either of these abstract concepts. Our
emotions, however, you realise they are mental states sense of time, then, is bound up more with our sense of
induced by physiological responses to the world. self than anything else. ❚

Chapter 4 | Perceiving time | 59

RESYNCHING
YOUR BODY CLOCK
Ditching artificial light and living by the
natural cycle of the sun can offer plenty of
benefits for your health.

ITH access to artificial light, Today, most of us spend our daytimes in the
many of us are staying awake equivalent of twilight. Illuminance is measured in lux,
when our brains and bodies which refers to the amount of light striking a surface.
are expecting sleep, throwing Direct sunshine is around 100,000 lux and the full
the body into uncoordinated moon is only 0.1 lux. Even the brightest artificial light,
chaos. For evidence on why like supermarkets and operating theatres, provide
this is bad news, look no about the same illuminance as an overcast day, around
further than night-shift 1000 lux.
workers. This type of working At the back of the eye, behind the rod and cone cells
pattern is so bad for our that enable our brains to construct images, are light-
health that more than one report in the past few years responsive cells called intrinsically photosensitive
has classified night shift work as “probably retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). These fire in response to
carcinogenic”. It is also linked to increased risk of type 2 any light if it is bright or sustained enough but they are
diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleep problems and particularly sensitive to light in the blue part of the
depression. Divorce rates are high in this group, too. spectrum. This includes bright daylight, many LEDs
Today, the average Westerner spends 90 per cent of and light from screens.
their life indoors. That means getting less light during These ipRGCs send signals to areas of the brain that
the day and being exposed to more light at night. This control alertness. One study found that exposure to an
pattern is increasingly being linked to disrupted sleep hour of low-intensity blue light increased people’s
and circadian rhythms – 24-hour fluctuations in our reaction speeds more than if they had drunk two cups
biology and behaviour – with consequences for our of coffee. The cells also send signals to a tiny patch of
physical and mental health. brain tissue called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN).
Our changed relationship with the sun is profoundly This functions as the body’s master clock, tweaking the
affecting our biology. That’s why researchers are timing of the circadian clocks ticking in every cell of our
investigating how much damage we do by shying away bodies to keep them synchronised with each other and
from natural patterns of light and dark, and just how with the external time of day. Exposure to light in the
much light we need. The good news is that tapping back evening delays the timing of the SCN, making you more
in to these natural rhythms with even small increases owlish.
in your exposure to bright light during the day have a
wide range of benefits, from improving sleep and ←-
mood to speeding recovery from serious illness. For more on body clocks, turn back to page 54-

60 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 LIVING
WITHOUT
TIME
It is also important that we are plunged into darkness Our lives are organised by seconds,
at night. Besides shifting the timing of our body clocks
and providing an unwanted boost to alertness, light at minutes, hours and days. What would
night may also suppresses the release of melatonin, a happen if unshackled ourselves from
hormone that reinforces the biological message that it
is night, including to parts of the brain that promote life’s metronome?
sleep. People living in areas with elevated levels of light
pollution tend to go to bed and wake up later than
those living in darker areas. They also sleep less, are
more tired during the daytime and are less satisfied HAT would happen to the
with the quality of their sleep. human body and mind if we
Because of this, ditching your watch and following did away with time
natural cues of light and dark would probably be good altogether? In 1962, French
for your health, and maybe even your relationship, as geologist Michel Siffre set
long as you also did away with artificial lighting. about doing just that,
Getting the best kind of light during the day spending 63 days in a deep
means waking up at a regular time and opening the cave, cut off from all light
curtains as soon as you wake. Get as much daylight as except his torch. His
you can, by going outside where possible and sitting escapade revealed that the
near windows. But not everyone can walk or cycle to body has its own clock that will shift if not kept in check
work, sit next to a large window or get outside during by exposure to both light and dark. In a follow-up
their lunch break. If you have to be indoors, try to use experiment, Siffre extended his cave time to an epic six
the right light. The idea is that by adjusting the months, during which his circadian rhythm stretched
blueness – and sometimes the brightness – to more to 48 hours, his sense of time passing slowed and he
closely replicate conditions outdoors, we could also became depressed, much like we see with shift
improve our sleep, health and well-being. During the workers.
day this means using bright, bluer, overhead lighting. Experiencing a marked contrast between day and
Then, in the evening, use dimmer, warmer lighting, night is important. Our light exposure influences the
with things like table lamps rather than overhead amplitude of our biological rhythms: they become
bulbs. Listen to your body and go to bed when you flatter under more constant light conditions, which has
start feeling sleepy. ❚ been associated with poorer sleep. >

Chapter 4 | Perceiving time | 61

 ESSAY

THE TRIBE
WITH NO
CLOCK TIME
Today, specialised sleep labs can create an alternative We all, regardless of our cultural
to the cave life that is more comfortable, but just as
removed from the real world. The floor is raised to background, experience time. But is
insulate from noise, there are no windows or clocks and everyone’s concept of time the same,
staff must be careful not to mention the time of day or
wear clothes that could give anything away. asks Chris Sinha
Researchers must arrive clean shaven so as not to reveal
the passage of time.
Without these time cues, artificial lighting and rigged
clocks can be used to manipulate people’s sense of time
passing, and in doing so answer all sorts of questions.
Among some of the most pressing are what happens to
our mental health when our body clocks get out of PROFILE
sync, as well as looking at how the many clocks across CHRIS
the body might respond better to things like food or
drugs at different times of the day.
SINHA
Another side effect of timelessness, as Siffre reported Chris Sinha is an
in his caves, is an intense feeling of being in the present.
Honorary Professor at
This is something you can explore too – no cave
needed. Just book into a flotation tank. the University of East
The brain is effectively a prediction machine, making Anglia. He is interested
sense of what has just happened to anticipate what in the relationships
comes next. Without sensory inputs from the world between language,
around us, whether in a cave or a tank, this system cognition and culture.
breaks down. Without time, it seems, we may quite
literally lose ourselves in the moment. Such an
experience might be a fun distraction from the tyranny
of the clock, but being able to track time helps bring
people together too. So we should probably be wary of
throwing away our watches for good. ❚

62 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

VERA DA SILVA SINHA

The Amondawa people of

Brazil have no clock time

NTHROPOLOGISTS have found that my colleagues carried out with an indigenous

ways of organising and naming time Amazonian community.
intervals vary greatly between The Amondawa, who live in a remote, forested area of
human groups. The minutes and the Brazilian state of Rondônia, were first contacted by
hours used for segmenting and the outside world in 1986. Traditionally they have lived
measuring clock time, natural as they by small-scale farming, hunting and fishing. Like many
may seem to us, are in fact inherited other Amazonian languages, theirs has a very restricted
from the ancient Babylonians, who number vocabulary, with only four numbers, so the
first invented this notation. And lack of clock time and a numerically based calendar is
different cultures have different hardly surprising.
calendars. Nevertheless, orienting ourselves in time For the Amondawa, time during the day is marked by
using hours, days and months appears as fundamental the sun’s position in the sky, and by activities such as
to our mental and social lives as orienting ourselves in rising, eating and working that habitually take place at
space using landmarks, routes and distances. different times. With no words for month and year,
In fact, space and time seem to be closely related longer intervals are named as subdivisions of the dry
domains of human cognition, if the way we talk about and rainy seasons. The language has no abstract term
them is a reliable guide. We speak of events occurring in for time, and when asked to translate the Portuguese
relation to temporal landmarks, in the same way that word tempo, speakers use the word kuara, or sun.
we locate objects in relation to spatial landmarks. So an Neither do the Amondawa celebrate birthdays.
event can take place in the summer or on Friday. People pass through named life stages, taking on a new
We also think and speak of events, and the people personal name based on gender and clan with each
that experience them, as moving on a timeline, for transition. When a new baby is born, for example, it will
example “winter is approaching” or “she is coming up take the name of its older sibling and that child will
to her exams”. Such metaphorical mapping of spatial adopt a different name.
language to that of time can be found across the We tried to elicit space-time metaphors such as “the
languages of the world. dry season is coming” from Amondawa speakers, but
This has led cognitive scientists to claim that found that they do not use them. This is not because
using spatial concepts to talk and think about time they do not comprehend the meaning of such
is a universal characteristic of the human mind. expressions, since bilingual Amondawa speakers
But these claims are challenged by research I and readily understand space-time metaphors in their >

Chapter 4 | Perceiving time | 63

 second language, Portuguese, and the Amondawa
language itself uses quasi-metaphoric expressions
LANGUAGE such as “the path goes to the riverbank”. And it is
not because the language grammatically precludes
AND TIME using spatial terms in conjunction with time-interval
nouns. Amondawa speakers will happily talk about
When we talk about time, we frame it in terms of movement of the sun, kuara, while rejecting the
space. English speakers look “forward” to good same word when speaking of the temporal “motion”
times ahead and leave the past “behind”. A day of the dry season.
flies by just as a ball does, while a deadline How should we interpret these findings? Our
approaches the same way a tiger might. But the hypothesis is that, because they have no calendar or
spatial metaphors we use vary from language to other number-based time-measurement system, the
language, and some people think those Amondawa have no corresponding concept of
differences affect our perception of time. “abstract” time. Their time intervals are structured
The idea that language shapes thought is around the rhythms of the natural and social world,
controversial. Critics argue that the words we use rather than being segments of a calibrated timeline
simply reflect thoughts that have emerged or independent of and superimposed upon these worlds.
been constructed through other means. Yet when Lacking an event-independent time, the Amondawa
we compare mental representations of time in do not metaphorically “move around” in it, or “place”
speakers of different languages, there are hints events in it, which accounts for the absence of space-
that they influence the way people think about it. time metaphors in the language. Amondawa time, to
In Mandarin, earlier events are said to be “up” put it another way, is identical to the events and
and later events to be “down”. When people are routines of everyday life, rather than being, as it is for
asked to arrange photographs depicting a us, a “technology of the mind” used for organising
sequence in time, Mandarin speakers are more those events and routines.
likely to line them up vertically than English Amondawa time strikes us as odd and
speakers, who tend to place them from left to remarkable. But taking a longer view of human culture,
right. What’s more, people who speak both it is we who are exceptional. Small-scale societies,
languages are more likely to arrange time organised around face-to-face encounters, have been
vertically if the test is conducted in Mandarin. Of around much longer than hierarchically structured,
DEVRIMB/AKINDO/ISTOCK

course, it is difficult to know for sure if language is socially differentiated ones. Traditional societies
constructing particular representations of time, can manage without the cognitive technologies of
rather than just reflecting them. calendar and clock. Our experience of time, it seems,
owes as much to cultural invention as to the workings
of the brain. ❚

64 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 Essential Guides

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CHAPTER 5

66 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

In quantum mechanics, time doesn’t have an arrow. Equations work
equally well forwards as backwards in time. Yet in certain situations,
this reversibility can be broken.

How time manages both to have and not have an arrow is just one of
the many puzzles of quantum mechanics. But it is something we will
have to solve if we are ever going to achieve one of the biggest goals
of modern physics.

There is no satisfying quantum treatment of the workings of gravity,

which remains the purview of general relativity. Combining the two into
a single theory of quantum gravity is one of the outstanding challenges
in theoretical physics. Time could be the route to this elusive goal.

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 67

QUANTUM
WEIRDNESS
Time in the quantum world is strange and confusing. To understand it,
it helps to first know some of the other concepts that also make the
quantum world as bizarre as it is.

T ALL started back in 1900, when Max Planck the slits and, over time, you will see a pattern of light
assumed, purely to make the maths work, that and dark stripes build up. It is as if each photon were a
the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a wave that passed through both slits, then diffracted and
perfectly absorbing “black body” comes in the interfered with itself like ripples encountering an
form of discrete packets of energy, or quanta. obstacle on a pond.
In 1905, Albert Einstein took that idea and ran Mathematically, these sorts of imponderables are
with it. In his Nobel-prizewinning work on the described using entities known as wave functions.
photoelectric effect, he assumed that quanta These depict quantum objects as existing
were real, and all electromagnetic waves, light simultaneously in superpositions of all possible states,
included, also act like discrete particle-like not just of position, but momentum, energy or any
entities called photons. other property you might measure. Each possible state
Work in the 1920s then reversed the logic. It found comes with a probability attached reflecting how often
that discrete, point-like particles such as electrons also you would see it if you made the same measurement
come with a wavelength, and sometimes act like waves. many times over – but you will never know for certain
Physicist Richard Feynman called this wave-particle what you will get from any one measurement.
duality the “only mystery” of quantum physics – the Complicating things still further is the uncertainty
one from which all the others flow. You can’t explain it principle, which says that there are pairs of quantum
in the sense of saying how it works, he wrote; you can properties, such as position and momentum, that you
only say how it appears to work. can never measure together to an arbitrarily high
How it appears to work is often illustrated by the accuracy.
classic double-slit experiment. You fire a stream of Then comes the phenomenon of entanglement.
single photons (or electrons, or any object obeying Einstein introduced this in a paper he co-authored in
quantum rules) at two narrow slits close together. Place 1935 in the spirit of pointing out it couldn’t be true. It
a measuring device at either of the two slits and you says that if you prepare two quantum particles in the
will see blips of individual photons with distinct same state and separate them, measurements on the
positions passing through. But place a screen behind one influence the outcome of measurements on the >

68 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

PETROVV/ISTOCK

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 69

 Quantum double-slit experiments tell us
that nothing is quite as it seems

Measurements at the slits detect single photons passing

through one slit or the other: LIGHT IS MADE OF PARTICLES

other. This “spooky action at a distance”, in Einstein’s

phrase, has been demonstrated in countless LASER
experiments, and is now the basis of emerging
technologies such as quantum computing. SCREEN
In the quest to figure out what lies behind the
backdrop to reality we call space-time, we have begun
to learn that the space part can emerge from quantum Allow the photons to reach the screen and an interference
pattern develops over time: LIGHT IS A WAVE, and it passes
entanglement. Time is a different story. through both slits
But there is one way to derive the fourth dimension
from the same phenomenon, suggested back in 1983 by

INTERFERENCE PATTERN
Don Page, now at the University of Alberta in Canada,
and William Wootters at Williams College in
Williamstown, Massachusetts. In quantum mechanics,
if a system can be in various different states, we can add
those states together in any combination to create new
states, superpositions of the originals. An electron, for
example, can be spinning clockwise or
counterclockwise, but it can also be in a superposition
of both.
With that in mind, consider a quantum system Now introduce an entangled "probe" photon that tells us which
consisting of two subsystems: one is a clock and the slit its partner photon passed through. Measure at the slits again,
other is everything else. Let the system as a whole and the states of the two photons must agree
evolve through time, so that the clock reads differently
at each moment. Now take a series of such moments,
say one per second, and add together all the specific
quantum states at all the moments—all the ways the
world actually was at each reading of the clock.
This gives you a new super-state, a superposition of
individual states with specific clock readings and PROBE PHOTON
specific configurations of everything else. It doesn’t
evolve with time. But because this is a quantum system,
the clock is entangled with the rest of the world. And if
Take measurements at the screen, however, and half the time they
we were to measure the clock to see what it read, the disagree: the state of the probe suggests the travelling photon went
rest of the system would instantly snap into whatever through one slit, but its position on the screen implies it passed
quantum state the original system had at that through the other – A SEEMINGLY SURREAL TRAJECTORY
corresponding time.
In this way, time can appear to emerge even in an
unchanging quantum state. The key is entanglement;
all we need is a clock subsystem that is entangled with
the rest of the universe in the right way. If a clock can be
in a superposition of ticking at different rates, it would
indicate that time in quantum mechanics isn’t PROBE PHOTON
fundamental, but relative to a given clock. In other
words, time is just what your clock reads. ❚

70 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

CAUSE AND EFFECT IN
THE QUANTUM REALM
The lack of straightforward cause and effect in quantum mechanics
muddles our understanding of how time works at the smallest realms.

REDICTING the future is easy, if you are real experiments. In 2015, Philip Walther at the
a physicist. Break a glass, and you can University of Vienna, Austria, and his colleagues saw a
boldly assert that it will fall into a photon pass through two gates, A and B, in an
number of shards, assuming you know indefinite order, meaning that it was impossible to tell
the initial conditions. Knowing the whether it went through gate A and then B, or through
past is more difficult – you need to gate B and then A – its path was a superposition of both.
store much more information to piece There are tantalising hints that a similar picture
a pile of broken glass back together. might hold for causality. Walther and his team followed
This “causal asymmetry” makes it up the work in 2017 with a more complex version of the
easier to determine cause and effect 2015 experiment that incorporated a measurement
and thus place events in order. But it doesn’t exist in designed to test the causal order. This is where it got
the quantum world. tricky to implement. “You have to build the device in
Among its weirdest predictions is the notion of such a way that until the very end of the entire process
quantum superposition: the idea that an object can be you’re not allowed to know or to extract which result
in two different states at the same time. This is often you got,” says Walther. If you learned the result of the
taken to mean that an event can be said to have measurement during the experiment, the
happened and not happened, or that a cat – to borrow superposition would collapse, and causal relationships
the most famous example – can be both alive and dead would resume as normal. It appeared that the photons
until observed. But as weird as these are, some things were passing through the gates in both orders at the
were thought to be off limits. The order in which events same time, but the fiddliness of the design meant that
take place, for example, was thought to be exempt from the experiment was not totally convincing.
this quantum weirdness. In 2019, Caslav Brukner at the University of Vienna
A paper published in 2012 shattered this assumption. published a paper that took this idea a step further. He
It proposed that the temporal sequence of two events, wanted to build a picture of causality that reflected the
just like the positions of a particle or the path it took, full complexity of the world, merging the notions of
could also exist in superposition. That would mean temporal superposition from quantum mechanics
that the arrow of time could have abrupt kinks in its with general relativity’s prediction that time seems to
trajectory. pass more slowly in stronger gravitational fields.
This radical revision of time turned out to be more His thought experiment imagines a scenario in
than a wild imagining: it appears to be backed up by which two spaceships – operated by sworn enemies >

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 71

When two photons, 1 and 2 , are entangled, their states are linked. we shall call Alice and Bob – synchronise clocks before
In a 2017 experiment, the state of one photon was entangled with the readying their photon cannons to fire. Then, at
order in which the other passed through gates and . Placing precisely 12.00, each of them fires a photon at the
photon 1 in a superposition of both its states effectively superposed other’s ship. But there is a plot twist: Bob’s spacecraft is
the causal order of photon 2 . This means it passed through both docked near a dense planet. According to general
gates in both orders at the same time relativity, objects such as this with strong gravitational
fields would cause nearby clocks to slow. So, time
should run slower for Bob, and he would get Alice’s
photon before his clock shows 12.00.
1
State 1 So far, so classical. But, Brukner asks, what if you
could put that massive planet into a quantum
superposition state, so that it is close to both Alice and
2 Bob, and affects both of their clocks? In that scenario,
the impossible seems to happen: a superposition state
is created where Alice’s photon arrives at Bob’s
spaceship before he sends his, but Bob’s photon also
reaches Alice before she sends hers. Giving an object
the size of a planet the full quantum treatment may
State 2
seem impossible, but physicists are working diligently
to put ever-bigger objects into superpositions.
Physicists have messed with causality before. Earlier
theories have suggested that, in quantum mechanics,
causality can be reversed. The idea that the future can
influence the present, and that the present can
influence the past, is known as retrocausality. But
quantum causality goes a step further than just
flipping or shifting the order of events, allowing
Superposition of multiple orders to essentially exist at once.
State 1
State 2 In fact, the idea that the causal structure of events can
be in a superposition is something that physicists
Superposition of looking into theories of quantum gravity already use
routinely in their work.
Those physicists expect causality to break down
under extreme conditions where physics as we
currently understand it falls apart, like in the early
moments of the big bang or inside black holes, which
are thought to have infinite density.
Even more exciting for some, work on quantum
causality is pushing the boundaries of quantum
mechanics itself. For some theorists, quantum theory
isn’t necessarily the last word in the physics of the very
small. In order to move beyond it, however, to some
newer, shinier school of thought, we would need to find
ways of relaxing the requirements of causality. ❚

72 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

ESSAY

STEPHEN HAWKING’S
FINAL THEOREM
In his final years, Stephen Hawking tackled the for us both. For the next two decades, until his death,
Stephen and I worked shoulder to shoulder on novel
question of why the universe appears fine-tuned ideas that suggest a radically new understanding of
for life. His collaborator Thomas Hertog explains why the universe is the way it is. In our conception, the
laws of physics themselves have, in a sense, evolved to
the radical solution they came up with, which be the way they are.
involves quantum mechanics and a new In that first meeting, in June 1998, I found Stephen
sitting behind his desk with his head leaning against a
approach to time. headrest on his wheelchair. The office window was
open and I later learned that he liked to keep it that way
at all times, even in freezing weather. On one of the
T WAS common knowledge among students at blackboards were equations that appeared to date from
the University of Cambridge that whoever the early 1980s. I wondered if they might be his last
obtained the best marks in the final part of the handwritten scrawls.
mathematical tripos exams would be “The universe appears designed,” he said through his
summoned to see Stephen Hawking. I had just speech synthesiser. He continued: “Why is the universe
got my results and had come top. Sure enough, the way it is?” None of my physics teachers had asked
I was invited for a discussion with him. questions like this before. “Isn’t that a philosophical
I made my way to his office deep in the matter?” I tried. “Philosophy is dead,” Stephen replied,
labyrinth of the department of applied his eyes twinkling.
mathematics and theoretical physics, which He was a master of packing a lot into a few choice
was housed in a creaking Victorian building on the words. When he spoke of the universe being designed,
banks of the river Cam. Stephen’s office was just off the he was referring to the observation that, of all the
main common room, and even though it was noisy universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well
there, he liked to keep his door ajar. I knocked, paused configured to bring forth life. What to make of this has
and slowly pushed it open. bedevilled thinkers one way or another for centuries.
I didn’t quite know what to expect on the other side Yet it is only fairly recently that we have discovered how
of that door. I knew, of course, that Stephen was famous deep these waters run.
for his work on black holes and that he had even got The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns
into trouble for some of his ideas about what happens the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous
when they explode. But it turned out that he was features in these laws that render the universe just right
musing on a different question: why is the universe just for living things. Twiddle ever so slightly with any of
right for life to arise? these and habitability would often hang in the balance.
Pondering this question would turn into a long quest Take the Higgs boson, which weighs as much as >

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 73

133 protons. This may sound heavy (for a particle), but it biofriendly laws were forged in a series of random
is 100 million billion times lighter than many transitions during its earliest moments of expansion.
physicists would consider a natural mass. The Higgs Reasoning along these lines, cosmologists started
boson couples to other particles of matter and, in this wondering whether, perhaps, there was more than one
way, imbues them with mass, but these couplings also universe. Maybe we live in a multiverse, an enormous,
add to the Higgs’s own mass, so you would expect it to inflating space with a variegated patchwork of
be a far weightier beast. The unbearable lightness of the universes, each with its own big bang, leading to its
Higgs is crucial for life, however, for a light Higgs keeps own local physical laws.
electrons, protons, neutrons and so on light as well. This led to a sweeping change of perspective on the
That, in turn, ensures that the building blocks of life, idea of our universe being fine-tuned for life. Even
such as DNA, proteins and cells, don’t collapse under though most universes would be sterile, in some, the
the force of gravity. laws of nature are bound to be just right for life. String
Or consider the expansion of the universe. In 1998, theorist Leonard Susskind once likened the local
cosmologists discovered that the expansion of space character of physical laws in the multiverse to the
has been accelerating for about 5 billion years. The weather on the US east coast: “Tremendously variable,
cause of this acceleration is often attributed to almost always awful, but lovely on rare occasions.” In
something known as vacuum energy, which is his view, our delightful cosmic weather is a fluke and
predicted by quantum theory. But the density of the impression of design is an illusion.
vacuum energy seems to be 10120 times lower than All this was very much on Stephen’s mind when I first
physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum walked into his office in 1998. I could sense he wasn’t
energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, keen on the idea of a multiverse. Before long, I was
however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and collaborating with him to try to find a better answer,
acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This first as his PhD student and later as his colleague.
would have meant that matter was so sparsely Stephen’s reticence to embrace the multiverse grew
distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stronger in the early 2000s, when it became clear that it
stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation didn’t actually explain anything. In multiverse
of life. cosmology, there are “metalaws” governing all the
The laws of physics and cosmology have many more universes. But these metalaws don’t specify in which of
such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the habitable universes we are supposed to be. This is a
the universe is a fix – a big one. Traditionally, most problem, for without a rule that relates the metalaws of
scientists regarded the mathematical relationships the multiverse to the local laws within our universe,
that underpin the laws of physics as transcendental multiverse musings get caught in a spiral of paradoxes
Platonic truths. In which case, the answer to the riddle that leaves us without verifiable predictions.
of cosmic design – to the extent that it is an answer – is Multiverse cosmology is like a debit card without a PIN
that it is a matter of mathematical necessity. The or an IKEA flatpack closet without a manual: useless.
universe is the way it is because nature had no choice. Can we do better? Yes, Stephen and I found out, but
Around the turn of the 21st century, an entirely only by relinquishing the idea, inherent in multiverse
different explanation emerged. This one had its roots cosmology, that our theories can take a God’s-eye view,
in a series of surprising discoveries that suggested that as if somehow standing outside the cosmos. It is an
at least some properties of the physical laws might not obvious and seemingly tautological point: our
be carved in stone, but could instead be the accidental cosmological theory must account for the fact that we
outcome of the particular manner in which the early exist within the universe. “We are not angels who view
universe cooled after the big bang. From the species of the universe from the outside,” Stephen began to
particles to the strength of forces to the amount of preach. So we set out to rethink cosmology from an
vacuum energy, it became apparent that the universe’s inside-out, observer’s perspective. This, we soon

74 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

 Thomas Hertog (left)
collaborated with Stephen
Hawking for many years

discovered, required adopting a quantum outlook from

within the universe.
The key role of the observer has been recognised since
the discovery of quantum theory in the 1920s. Before a
particle’s position is observed, there is no sense in even
asking where it is. It doesn’t have a definite position,
only possible positions described by a wave function
that encodes the likelihood that the particle, if it were
observed, would be here or there. Of course, quantum
observations are by no means restricted to those made
by humans. Such observations could be made by a
dedicated detector, by the environment or even through
interaction with a lone photon.
COURTESY OF THOMAS HERTOG

Stephen and I came to understand what went on in

the early universe as a process akin to that of natural
selection on Earth, with an interplay of variation and
selection playing out in this primeval environment.
Variation happens because random quantum jumps
cause frequent small excursions from deterministic
behaviour and occasional larger ones. Selection enters
the picture because some of these excursions,
especially the larger ones, can be amplified and
frozen-in thanks to quantum observation. This then
gives rise to new rules that help shape the subsequent
evolution.
The interaction between these two competing forces
in the furnace of the big bang produces a branching
PROFILE process – somewhat analogous to how biological
THOMAS species would emerge billions of years later – in which
HERTOG dimensions, forces and particles first diversify and
then acquire their effective form when the universe
expands and cools.
Thomas Hertog is an
And just like in Darwinian evolution, this introduces
internationally renowned a subtle backward-in-time element to our hypothesis.
cosmologist, who was for It is as if the collective quantum observations
many years a close retroactively fix the outcome of the big bang. For this
collaborator of Stephen reason, Stephen liked to refer to our idea as “top-down
Hawking. He is a professor cosmology”, to drive home the point that we read the
fundamentals of the universe ex post facto, somewhat
of theoretical physics at the
like how biologists reconstruct the tree of life. “We
University of Leuven, where create the universe as much as the universe creates us,”
he studies the quantum he once told me. When New Scientist covered our idea
nature of the big bang. in 2006, it was described as a “reverse choose-your-
own adventure”.
In hindsight, we were walking on quicksand back >

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 75

then in the sense that we didn’t quite have a solid Platonist view that the laws of nature are somehow
mathematical basis for our ideas. As we began to look immutable. Stephen and I held that it isn’t the laws as
for firmer ground, inspiration came from an such that are fundamental, but their capacity to
unexpected corner. Around that time, another change.
revolution in physics was picking up, one that was all to The upshot of all this is a profound revision of what
do with holography. This would prove to be just what cosmology is ultimately about. For almost a century, we
we needed. have been studying the history of the universe against
A normal hologram encodes all information about a a stable background of fixed laws of nature. But the
three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional quantum outlook that Stephen and I developed reads
surface. In a sense, the third dimension emerges from the universe’s history from within and as one that
the surface when we look at it. The first inklings that includes, in its earliest stages, the genealogy of the
even the force of gravity may have holographic roots go physical laws.
back to work in the 1970s by Stephen and, separately, It is a radical idea, for sure, but one that may, in time,
Jacob Bekenstein. They discovered that all there is to become testable. Some ideas to do with the early
know about the interior of black holes can be encrypted universe can be tested by deciphering the cosmic
on their event horizon surface. microwave background (CMB) radiation, the flood of
Then, in 1997, physicist Juan Maldacena went further light released 380,000 years after the big bang. But the
and envisaged that the entire universe may be akin to a primeval evolution we envisage unfolded before that,
hologram. He showed that a system of quantum- meaning it is hidden far behind the CMB. We are in a
entangled particles located on a surface can contain situation not unlike Charles Darwin in the 19th century,
within it all the information of a higher-dimensional who had only scant fossil evidence for his grand new
cosmos with gravity and curved space-time. Soon, hypothesis.
holography became the talk of the town among But I am hopeful this won’t be the case forever. We
theoretical physicists, who saw in it a promising way to are witnessing a revolution in gravitational wave
finally get Albert Einstein’s general relativity, his theory astronomy and these waves can reach us from well
of gravity, to work with quantum theory. before the CMB era. Future observations of primeval
At first, the kind of universes generated by gravitational waves should enable us to probe the
holographic theory bore no resemblance whatsoever universe’s earliest phase.
to the expanding universe we live in. However, starting An entirely different path to test our ideas has to do
in around 2011, Stephen and I figured out how to apply with holography. Already, quantum experimentalists
the cosmos-as-hologram idea to describe the earliest are attempting to create strongly entangled quantum
stages of an expanding universe like ours. In this systems, made up of trapped atoms or ions, that
cosmological setting, it turns out it is the dimension of holographically encode some of the properties of black
time that holographically pops out. History itself is holes or toy-model universes. By experimenting with
holographically encrypted. these systems, we can hope to learn more about what
What’s more, time emerges in the ex post facto sort of entanglement patterns underpin gravity and
manner that we had envisioned. The past is contingent the fabric of space-time. We might also be able to see
on the present in holographic cosmology, not the other whether the origin of time happens in the specific way
way around. In a holographic approach to cosmology, Stephen and I envisaged. That would amount to an
venturing far back in time means taking a fuzzy look at experimental practice of early universe cosmology.
the cosmological hologram. It is like zooming out, an Turning cosmology inside out and upside down was
operation whereby we discard more and more of the a quintessentially Hawkingian act. For Stephen and I,
entangled information that the hologram encodes. inspired by the paradoxes of the multiverse, it was a
Holography suggests that not only time, but also the way to get a grip on the appearance of cosmic design. If
physical laws that shape our universe, disappear back this new thinking turns out to be right, it may yet prove
into the big bang. This is very different to the old to be his greatest scientific legacy. ❚

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TIME
CRYSTALS
A unique phase of matter called a time crystals repeat in space.
Still, time crystals appeared impossible under the
crystal is something that repeats a pattern laws of physics. They didn’t remain theoretical for long,
in time, unlike normal crystals, which have though. In 2017, two teams found a way to make a kind
of time crystal that oscillates, by repeatedly firing lasers
patterns in space. Time crystals can, in at various substances. Although the resulting systems
theory, flip between two configurations didn’t exactly follow Wilczek’s original definition, these
“discrete” time crystals did have certain properties that
forever with no energy input necessary. oscillated, unrelated to the firing pattern of the laser.
Then, in 2022, Hans Keßler at the University of
Hamburg in Germany and his colleagues created a
HE idea of time crystals was first “continuous” time crystal using a constant source of
speculated by MIT physicist and Nobel laser light rather than the discrete bursts utilised in the
laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012, while he earlier experiments. Keßler and his team cooled about
was teaching a class on ordinary crystals, 50,000 rubidium atoms to almost absolute zero and
such as salt or snowflakes. In a typical trapped them between two nanoscale mirrors that
crystal, the atoms or molecules are contained the powerful laser beam.
tightly arranged in regularly repeating The interactions between the atoms and the laser’s
patterns in three-dimensional space, photons – particles of light – made both the
resembling a lattice. Wilczek thought it distribution of the atoms and the intensity of the
might be possible to create a similar photons constantly oscillate.
crystal-like structure in time, which is treated as a This is similar to what happens in a more prosaic
fourth dimension under relativity. Instead of regularly crystal such as ice. Liquid water looks the same in every
repeating rows of atoms, a time crystal would exhibit direction, but when it freezes, a repeating lattice
regularly repeating motion. structure forms instead. And like with ice, where you
Many physicists were sceptical. They argued that a can’t predict where the molecules will be located, you
time crystal whose atoms could loop forever, with no also can’t pinpoint when the repetition starts in the
need for extra energy, would be tantamount to a time crystal, due to a quirk of quantum mechanics.
perpetual motion machine – forbidden by the laws of Understanding such graphical representations of
physics. Wilczek countered that a time crystal was more when the physical state of a substance changes means the
akin to a superconductor, in which electrons flow with system can be more reliably produced and experimented
no resistance, and in theory could do so forever with, because it isn’t so closely dependent on the initial
without the need to add energy to the system. In a time conditions of the system. This latest time crystal lasts
crystal, electrons would travel in a loop rather than a only for about 10 milliseconds, but if that can be extended,
line and occasionally bunch up rather than flow then new quantum features could be introduced to the
smoothly, repeating in time the way atoms in ordinary system as the number of atoms in it is varied. ❚

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 77

ESSAY

Inspired by experiments showing entanglement

HOW TIME over time, not just space, a new way of thinking
of time in quantum mechanics treats space and

COULD UNITE time as part of one entity, says Vlatko Vedral.

PHYSICS N PHYSICS today, we have two pictures that

don’t match up. First is general relativity, Albert
Einstein’s set of equations that describe the way
classical objects are affected by gravity. It sets
out the three dimensions of space and the
fourth dimension of time as part of the same
entity, woven together in the fabric of space-
time. That works extremely well to a point. It is
excellent at describing the way space-time
bends around large masses, the way time slows
down when objects move close to the speed of light,
PROFILE and anything that concerns the dynamics of things
VLATKO larger than an individual particle.
VEDRAL But the fundamental force of gravity doesn’t fit into
quantum mechanics, our best description of the very
small. Atoms and subatomic particles seem to follow a
Vlatko Vedral is
totally different rule book. They are governed by the
professor of quantum other three fundamental forces of nature, the
Information theory at electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear
the University of Oxford. forces. Particles can appear to be in two places at once.
He spends a lot of time They can be entangled, with information seemingly
thinking about what passing between them instantaneously, even when
they are far away from each other. The quantum world
quantum mechanics
is also characterised by a strange fuzziness – the
means and how it affects uncertainty principle that says the more we know
everything and everyone about a particle’s position, the less we can be sure of its
around us. momentum. If this were the case in general relativity,
then you would only be able to know where your car is
or how fast it is going, never both.
Both theories have been remarkably successful in
their own domains. But the problems occur when they

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BBUILDER/ISTOCK

Could time be the key to

unifying the physics of the
very big and the very small?

are applied, at the same time, to a situation where both Then there are approaches that favour gravity over
should matter, like the centre of a black hole. We know quantum physics. In the 1970s and 80s, for instance,
black holes, which were predicted by general relativity, Lajos Diósi and Roger Penrose speculated that
exist. But since they involve a humongous gravitational quantum physics won’t endure beyond some basic
field packed into a quantum-sized region of space, we strength of gravity, at which point the so-called
have no way of describing what happens in their centres. quantum wave function that encapsulates quantum
This leaves a huge question: how to marry the properties collapses. Classical gravity, according to this
physics of the very big and the very small into one view, ultimately wins. Other such approaches are keen
coherent theory of everything? This question is at to understand quantum physics geometrically, to cast
the heart of the search for a single mathematical it in a form that is mathematically closer to general
framework that describes the whole universe, and relativity, like thinking of quantum superpositions as
there is no shortage of people trying to find an answer. analogous to the curvature of space-time in relativity.
It would be impossible to mention every individual Finally, there are advocates for a more fundamental
idea that attempts to unite physics, but I like to consider theory from which general relativity and quantum
them in groups. The first I think of as theories of mechanics both evolve. String theory, which seeks to
quantum gravity. These take ideas from general rewrite our understanding of what everything is made
relativity – like space-time, for example – and tweak of, is the most prominent of these. Instead of electrons
them to fit quantum mechanics. Among the most and quarks being fundamental, string theory claims
popular of these is an idea that treats gravity like any everything is made of unbelievably tiny, vibrating
other field, such as the electromagnetic field. In this “strings”, and that those vibrations produce effects that
theory, gravity is thought to be mediated by a we interpret as the particles we see. Unfortunately,
hypothetical particle called a graviton, similar to the string theory also requires a host of other entities –
photons that mediate electromagnetic interactions. such as multiple extra dimensions – that are well
Gravitons, however, would interact so weakly that beyond our experimental reach.
directly detecting one is nigh-on impossible. It is fair to say that all of our approaches to unify
In other approaches, space and time become discrete, quantum physics and gravity have failed so far, due to
meaning they can only exist in finite chunks – the same both the lack of mathematically consistent
way that the energy levels in an atom are discrete, or descriptions and the absence of experimental tests.
quantised. An example of these is loop quantum This is a problem.
gravity, in which these quantised chunks of space-time But what if we look at things another way? Instead of
are tiny loops. taking ideas from general relativity and moulding >

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 79

them to fit into quantum mechanics, I think we need to behaviour of quantum objects across all space-time at
change the way we think of time in quantum once. When making calculations about how a particle
mechanics. What if, to make quantum mechanics more should interact, for example, we write down all the
compatible with general relativity, we treat space and possible outcomes at all the possible points in space
time in the quantum world as we do in space-time – and every instance of time, instead of just at one
namely, on an equal footing? In relativity, time is instance of time as is normally done with the
interwoven with space. It can bend and stretch, Schrödinger equation. The fundamental dynamics are
depending on the speed or the gravity involved. This is the same – particles are still governed by the three
a far cry from the way most physicists talk about time fundamental forces. But instead of, for instance,
in quantum mechanics, where it is a fixed, separate describing a particle’s position over space at one point
entity, a series of steps through which interactions in time, we describe it over space-time.
evolve and nothing more. In traditional quantum Just as time is relative in general relativity, meaning it
mechanics, time is only inferred from looking at other depends on the observer, time becomes relative in this
observable quantities, such as the hands of a clock. description of quantum mechanics, too. It is no longer
This is reflected in the way we tackle equations in a fixed, separate entity. It depends on the observer.
quantum mechanics – how we, for example, describe What this means is that when you are looking at two
the position in space of a qubit, a quantum mechanical descriptions of a position in space-time, for example, it
alternative to the classical bit in computing, which can isn’t always possible to say whether one happened
exist in superpositions of several states at once. We before the other. This ambiguity doesn’t exist in
describe the qubit over time using a bit of mathematics standard quantum mechanics, where each of two
called the Schrödinger equation, which describes the events are in a clear relationship with one another as
strange and equivocal behaviour of quantum objects far as any observer is concerned.
and allows you to reliably calculate the odds of which of
that object’s properties, such as its location, you will see ←-
when we take a measurement of it. For more on cause and effect in the-
About 10 years ago, I began to consider an alternative quantum realm, see page 71-
to the Schrödinger equation. I read about some
experiments showing that quantum entanglement – In our description, which we first introduced in a paper
the superstrong link between the states of two in 2015, space-time is an entangled web of quantum-
quantum particles after they have interacted – can exist correlated events all given in advance. This is important
between not just objects in space, but also between the because this new way of thinking about quantum
states of the same object at two different times. This mechanics lends itself to unifying quantum theory
means that, in some cases, particles seem to be affected with general relativity, in the sense that both now have
by events that happen in their future. This is a strange a way of describing time that matches up.
idea to get your head around, undoubtedly. But it got Now, 10 years since I began working on this idea, my
me thinking, if particles can be entangled over time, colleagues and I have started to test it. We have
then perhaps in quantum mechanics, time isn’t the performed experiments with two types of qubits to
steady, outside ticking clock we think it is. illustrate that our approach works. What these
After this realisation, I wasn’t entirely clear how to experiments have demonstrated is that anything that
proceed. But, for the past decade, along with my can be calculated using the standard approach to
colleagues Joe Fitzsimons at the Singapore University quantum physics can also be calculated – just as easily –
of Technology and Jonathan Jones at the University of using our space-time version. Our description of
Oxford, I have developed an alternative mathematical quantum states is a perfectly valid alternative to that of
approach, one with profound implications. standard quantum mechanics. But because it shares a
Instead of describing the behaviour of a quantum description of time with general relativity, it is a step
object in space at one specific time, we describe the towards a unifying theory.

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“There is an unexpected
implication of all this:
quantum time travel”
What we haven’t shown yet is that our approach has so is progressing rapidly.
advantages over the standard one. To do this, we need If we turn out to be right, then the centre of a black
to zoom in to the very smallest of scales. Let us go back hole would be one place in which space and time could
to our journey towards the singularity at the centre of a no longer be discriminated from one another. A
black hole, where general relativity breaks down. The singularity occurs at the point where both space and
breakdown is intimately related to the fact that general time contract to zero. But a quantum uncertainty in
relativity equations blow up when we allow space and space-time would prevent something like this from
time to be arbitrarily small around the black hole happening, since both space and time couldn’t have
centre, leading to an infinite quantity called a the precise value of zero at the same time. Getting over
singularity. But when we apply our new way of thinking this stumbling block would be a breakthrough towards
about space-time in quantum mechanics, we can being able to unite general relativity and quantum
incorporate an extra degree of fuzziness that will save mechanics.
us from these singularities. As if that isn’t mind-boggling enough, there is an
Uniting physics could help us decipher black holes. unexpected implication of all of this, too: quantum
Just like the uncertainty that exists in quantum theory time travel. Closed time-like loops are theoretical loops
between a particle’s position and momentum, there created when space-time curves so much that it closes
may also be an uncertainty between space and time. in on itself – a route, it might seem, to the past. But until
If this is true, it means that at the centre of a black hole, now, although they appear to make sense in relativity,
the regions of space-time would be so small that space physicists have dismissed time-like loops, because they
and time can no longer be discriminated from one are prohibited by quantum mechanics.
another. Think about an entangled pair of particles, connected
We can – in principle – probe that experimentally, through some interaction so that a measurement on
too. The test would be similar to how we check the one immediately affects the other. If one of the two
uncertainty relations between the position and particles goes through a time-like loop, this trip back in
momentum of a single particle, but we would now be time creates two copies of that particle, one younger
testing the uncertainty between space and time. If we and one older. Each of the two copies ought to be
measure a distance between two events in space more maximally entangled to the other particle, the one that
precisely, their temporal separation becomes more didn’t go through the time loop, which isn’t allowed in
uncertain. We don’t know if this is the way nature is, conventional quantum physics. But if we use our
but our approach can certainly handle it in case it turns method to describe the situation, then the younger and
out to be true. Current experiments don’t seem to have older versions of the particle are simply entangled in
enough resolution to test space and time at these time. This means that quantum time travel is perfectly
minute scales. However, the technology required to do possible in our quantum space-time. ❚

Chapter 5 | Quantum time | 81

CHAPTER 6

82 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

Time’s essence might be mysterious, but there is one thing we can say
for certain: there is an awful lot of it about. Modern cosmology dates
the origin of the universe to some 13.75 billion years ago – that is a
lifetime of 4.3 × 1017 seconds, give or take a few million billion.

Deep time involves not only looking into the distant past, but ahead to
the future too. It is easy to become stuck in short-term thinking, but by
considering deep time – the vast timescales involved in the history and
future of the universe – we can gain a much needed perspective on our
own place in this epic story.

Chapter 6 | Deep time | 83

 THE
BEGINNING
OF TIME
Some 13.8 billion years ago, our universe, once thought to be eternal and
unchanging, began. Space and time popped up spontaneously, out of nothing,
in the big bang. Except we don’t know for sure that is what happened.

UR explanation of the big bang is an relativity to build a cosmic model, he followed the
extrapolation based on the equations orthodoxy of the day and assumed that the universe
of general relativity and our was static: that is, neither expanding nor contracting.
observations of a universe that, over He even added in an extra term in his equations, a sort
billions of years, has been expanding of anti-gravity called the cosmological constant, to
and cooling from something denser make sure it was so. Einstein later called it his “greatest
and hotter. We cannot see back to the blunder” – although the constant has since been
very moment of the big bang. Instead, revived to describe the mysterious dark energy that is
our observations take us back to some currently speeding up the universe’s acceleration.
380,000 years after a putative It seemed to be a blunder because observations by
beginning, when the universe had cooled enough for Edwin Hubble and others in the 1920s showed that
the first atoms to form, sending radiation pinging distant galaxies are “redshifted” as if they are moving
through the cosmos. We hear that radiation today as away from us. Others then used his theory to build
the hiss of the cosmic microwave background. models of an expanding universe. This was the
With Albert Einstein’s theories, we can go back beginning of today’s standard cosmological model,
further, to the first microsecond, when the entire which describes a universe that began in the hot, dense,
observable cosmos was about the size of our solar infinitesimal pinprick of the big bang some 13.8 billion
system. Beyond that, we are all at sea, with neither years ago.
CHONESS/SOLOLOS/ISTOCK

theory nor observations to help us. Wind Einstein’s The big bang is now orthodoxy, although without a
equations back enough, and you end up in a theory than unifies general relativity with quantum
“singularity” of infinite temperature and density that theory, we’re stuck in explaining exactly what it was or
seems to be a physical nonsense. why it happened. But the clinching evidence for it came
When around 1916, Einstein first used general by accident in 1964. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson >

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Chapter 6 | Deep time | 85
 Figuring out the age of the universe involves
a complex series of assumptions about its
geometry, expansion rate and composition.
Yet it is only fairly recently that we have had
an estimate we can be happy with.

THE AGE OF
were telecoms engineers working on an early version
of today’s mobile-phone technology when they
discovered an unexplainable, continuous noise in a
gigantic microwave receiver.

EVERYTHING
This is the oldest light in the universe, sent on its way
some 380,000 years after the big bang, when the
cosmos had cooled sufficiently for the first atoms to
form, allowing photons to travel freely. Probes
collecting this light, most recently the European Space
Agency’s Planck mission, have mapped it in fine detail,
providing information on the universe’s earliest years CIENTISTS’ best estimate is that the
and its make-up today – confirming the picture of the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.
standard model of cosmology, with its enigmatic But, like so many of the largest-scale
elements of dark matter and dark energy. properties of the universe, we are not
Cosmic inflation was invented to explain a couple of entirely sure about its age. There are
features of the universe that are hard to explain two competing estimates, based on two
without it. The first is that Einstein’s general theory of competing measurements of the
relativity famously makes mass bend space and time – expansion rate of the cosmos, meaning
so you’d expect a universe like ours, containing mass, it could be as young as 11.4 billion
to be overall curved in some way, either in on itself like years old.
a ball or out on itself like a saddle. The easiest way to get at the age of the universe
In fact, it’s darn nearly flat. Not only that, but even would be to find the oldest star and then work
bits of it far off in different directions as observed from backwards with what we know about how stars are
Earth have roughly the same temperature, although in formed. However, finding the exact age of a star can
an expanding universe there wouldn’t have been time be difficult.
for heat to pass between them to even things out. That Stellar dating involves measuring properties such as
seems a naked assault on the laws of thermodynamics. mass, chemical composition and temperature, and
Cosmic inflation solves these problems at a stroke. In comparing them with models of how those properties
its earliest instants, the universe expanded faster than should change over time for a particular type of star.
light (light’s speed limit only applies to things within One problem is that many of these models are
the universe). That ironed out wrinkles in its early calibrated by reference to the one star whose age and
chaotic self and meant that even now far-flung parts characteristics we can measure independently – our
were once in close contact, so could swap heat. sun. The accuracy of this depends on every star that
Inflation is now a built-in piece of our standard story looks like the sun ageing in exactly the same way. Some
of cosmic evolution. But it’s still controversial. In 2014, stars have even confused astronomers by appearing to
researchers claimed to have seen ripples from inflation be older than the universe itself.
imprinted on the cosmic microwave background. But So instead of determining how old the universe is
this proved mistaken, and it’s not clear what would by the age of objects within it, we use the expansion
have made the early universe inflate anyway. Worse, of the cosmos itself, winding back that growth to the
inflation is very difficult to stop, creating a multiverse big bang, when all of the matter and energy that exists
of causally disconnected universes that eternally bud now exploded outwards from a minuscule point.
off from one another. ❚ The problem there is that the expansion of the

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 The decay of natural isotopes can reveal the age of materials as far back as the formation of the solar system

Potassium-argon dating
CLAY MATERIALS
Carbon-14 dating
ORGANIC REMAINS

Thermoluminescence
(Light released during heating is proportional to age) LAVA, CERAMICS, SEDIMENTS

TODAY
CORAL AND FOSSILISED BONE
Uranium-thorium dating
ROCK
Uranium-lead dating
Rehydroxylation dating CERAMICS
(Based on moisture content)

4.6 billion 4 billion 1 million 700,000 100,000 60,000 10,000

Years

universe is not constant; by looking at the Such radiometric dating stands us in good stead for
movements of distant objects, we can tell that over dating objects from Earth’s beginnings almost to the
time, that expansion has accelerated. present day. In a large collection of radioactive atoms,
In order to understand how old the universe is, then, a set number will have decayed by a set time; by
we have to figure out the rate of that acceleration, measuring how much of a particular atom is sealed
which is represented by a number called the Hubble into a rock compared with the products of its decay, we
constant. That’s where the trouble comes in. There are get an idea of how long ago a rock or artefact formed.
two ways to measure the Hubble constant. For most rocks, the favoured method is uranium-lead
One uses the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a dating. Zircons are silicate minerals found in volcanic
relic of the very first light to shine after the big bang, as igneous rocks, made from solidified magma, and they
a sort of cosmic baby picture. We can take that light and often incorporate small impurities of uranium into
use our models of the universe’s evolution to calculate their crystal structures. Two isotopes – uranium-238,
what it ought to look like now, which gives one with a half-life of some 4.5 billion years, and
measurement of the Hubble constant. uranium-235 with a half-life of 704 million years –
The other method, called the local measurement, decay through two independent pathways, but both
is simpler. It uses observations of relatively nearby end on a stable isotope of lead. This produces a high
galaxies and supernovae to measure the rate of level of accuracy.
expansion of the universe and how that changes For younger rocks and prehistoric human artefacts,
between those objects. But those two measurements, other isotopes provide more accurate results. The
the baby picture and the recent one, disagree on how decay of potassium into argon has been used to date
fast the expansion of the universe is accelerating. If the the first appearance of human tools in the Olduvai
CMB measurements hold true, the universe is about gorge in Tanzania to some 2 million years ago. The
13.8 billion years old. But the local measurements put it more substantial parts of human history since about
as just around 11.4 billion years old. 60,000 years ago, meanwhile, are written largely in the
Closer to Earth, we can feel more confident in our language of carbon isotopes. While the standard
dating skills. We think we know roughly how old our carbon-12 isotope is stable, a form with two extra
sun and its surrounds are from tracking radioactive neutrons, carbon-14, has a half-life of 5730 years. Plants
decays in lumps of the solar system’s original material incorporate both forms through photosynthesis, and
that rain down from the sky: meteorites. The ratio of from there the isotopes proceed up the food chain.
lead isotopes in the Allende meteorite, which fell in When an organism dies, the carbon-14 slowly decays
Mexico in 1969, gives it an age of 4.57 billion years – away. It’s useful for dating everything from desiccated
and, by extension, the solar system is not much older. plant seeds to ice-bound mammoths. ❚

Chapter 6 | Deep time | 87

 Earth has a deep history and its past is full of
A TIME spectacular features that are now lost in the
mists of geological time. So, if you had a time

TRAVELLER’S machine, where would you go? Here are

seven wonders of the very ancient world.

GUIDE TO 700 MILLION YEARS AGO:

SNOWBALL EARTH

EARTH These days, if you want to see a glacier near the equator,
you must scale the rarefied heights of Mount Kenya or
the Ecuadorian Andes. Around 700 million years ago it
was a bit less of an effort. In fact, you’d struggle to find
somewhere that wasn’t frozen over.
The Cryogenian period was so called because the
planet was repeatedly sheathed in ice in a series of
“snowball Earth” episodes. The greatest of these
Cryogenian snowballs, the Sturtian glaciation, began
716.5 million years ago. In the space of a few years, land
and sea across the globe were swallowed up by sheets of
ice that eventually became kilometres thick. They did
not melt for another 55 million years. Earth was literally
a snowball, like today’s Antarctica from pole to pole.
Ancient glacial deposits laid down at tropical
latitudes – for example in north-western Canada, which
700-odd million years ago straddled the equator – tell a
story of sea ice between 1.5 and 3 kilometres thick. The
same region also provides clues to the Sturtian
glaciation’s cause. The Franklin Large Igneous Province,
a vast area of volcanic rock covering more than
1 million square kilometres, can be dated to shortly
before the glacial layers. It seems the eruption of a
PHILIPP TUR/ISTOCK

supervolcano brought vast volumes of basalt to the

surface that quickly weathered under tropical
rainstorms – a chemical process that sucked huge
amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of

88 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

the atmosphere. Temperatures plunged and the polar species. One proposed cause is a super-greenhouse
ice caps began to advance. climate, which persisted for several million years and
From then on things proceeded with a speed rendered much of Pangaea’s interior uninhabitable.
unusual for Earth processes. As the seas froze, water Expanses of reddish dust stretch as far as the eye can
vapour, itself a potent greenhouse gas, could no see. In the distance you can just make out the mighty
longer evaporate into the atmosphere in the usual Central Pangaean Mountains, unless it’s a windy day,
quantities. The big freeze gathered pace towards the when you’ll be face-to-face with a boiling red
equator. You won’t want to open the door of your time sandstorm.
machine, because even at the equator it will be -50°C, Next we recommend a quick zip east to the shores of
the sort of cold you can only reliably find today deep the Tethys Sea. You’re here to marvel at Pangaea’s most
in the Antarctic. extreme sight: the mega-monsoon. Monsoon rains
Perhaps because of its sheer drama, the snowball happen when moisture-laden sea air is blown onto
Earth idea remains controversial. Some geologists opt land and forced upwards, cooling and condensing the
for a less harsh “slushball Earth” variant. But Joseph water to make rain.
Kirschvink of the California Institute of Technology in At the edge of the Tethys, you risk getting utterly
Pasadena thinks the sheer geographical spread of drenched. The sea was probably as warm as hot soup,
glacial deposits now dated to the same time tell their about 40°C. That meant the air above it was wringing
own story. “It’s a hard snowball, dammit,” he says. wet. The mountains bordering the sea’s north shore
Eventually, CO2 seeping out from undersea volcanoes would have forced huge amounts of warm wet air up to
began to warm things again, and cracks in the ice stayed great heights, cooling it quickly and unleashing a
open. Then, snowball Earth was over almost as quickly deluge that makes today’s monsoon in India look like a
as it began. light shower. At least it would have been warm.

250 MILLION YEARS AGO: 165 M I LLI O N YE ARS AG O:

THE MOST EXTREME DESERT THE BIGGEST VOLCANIC
AND MONSOONS EVER A P O C A LY P S E E V E R

Earth’s most recent supercontinent, Pangaea, came Welcome to hell on Earth, aka the Paraná-Etendeka
together about 300 million years ago and started to province, circa 135 million years ago. By the time you
break apart 125 million years later. But to experience it arrive, the southern remnant of Pangaea, Gondwana,
at its most extreme, set your time machine for about has already spent millions of years pulling itself apart,
250 million years ago. separating what we now know as South America from
The best way to begin your visit would be to hover at Africa. This rifting was one of the factors that created
the edge of the atmosphere and gaze down at the vast the red-hot cataclysm you’ve come to see. As the rift
expanse of land. The continent is C-shaped with the worked its way north, Earth’s crust became thinner.
warm Tethys Sea nestled within the curve. From the Meanwhile, a superheated portion of the mantle
other side of the planet all you see is an unbroken was welling up, heating the crust from below.
expanse of ocean, Panthalassa. Eventually, magma broke through and flooded across
This point in time is just after the Permian mass the landscape. The modern-day remnant of this is
extinction, which wiped out around 90 per cent of called the Paraná-Etendeka (PE) traps, expanses >

Chapter 6 | Deep time | 89

of basalt covering more than 1.3 million square lived though, and the ash would eventually settle.
kilometres of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, After a few years of cooling, the colossal amount of
Namibia and Angola. carbon dioxide also pumped out by the eruption will
For the most part, this would be like the volcanism bring a much longer period of global warming. That
that gave us Iceland – passive, gentle and only rarely aspect, at least, is one you don’t need a time machine
explosive. The Volcanic Explosivity Index gives you an to experience.
idea of what’s in store: the eruption you’re here to see
has the maximum ranking of 8, which is described as 55 MILLION YEARS AGO:
“apocalyptic” (one ranking above “mega-colossal”). A N A R C T I C H E AT W AV E
This score is given to any event that ejects more than
1000 cubic kilometres of rock, as the supervolcano Pack your bathing suit, we’re going to the Arctic. It’s
Toba did in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, much to going to be hot and steamy. There will be palm trees
fledgling humanity’s inconvenience. The PE traps and crocodiles. This is the Paleocene-Eocene thermal
produced at least nine apocalyptic eruptions, probably maximum, or PETM, of 55 million years ago. For the
over several million years. They are the most violent past few million years, Earth has gradually been getting
eruptions in Earth’s history, as far as we know. hotter and hotter and is now on the verge of a planetary
The largest of them spewed at least 8600 cubic heatwave the likes of which have rarely been seen.
kilometres of rock – based on what we can see in South Even before the mercury peaks, it’s pretty toasty. The
America and Africa today – and perhaps as much as poles are essentially ice-free, the deepest reaches of the
26,000 cubic kilometres if you factor in far-flung ash oceans are 8°C warmer than today, sea levels are
and gases. roughly 70 metres higher and there are crocodile-like
An event on this scale will incinerate, smother or champsosaurs in the Arctic Ocean. The fact that they
choke everything for hundreds of kilometres in every thrived so close to the North Pole means water
direction. Lava from one eruption travelled 650 temperatures must have been no less than 5°C, even in
kilometres. In modern terms, if it happened in the the permanent darkness of winter. You may also catch a
Highlands of Scotland you would want to park your glimpse of the hippopotamus-like Coryphodon in the
time machine no closer than London. warm swampy forests along the ocean shores.
From that distance you would see the black Fast-forward a few million years and you will see
clouds mushrooming, as an almost inconceivable freshwater turtles, which seems bizarre until you
volume of ash is lofted by explosive force and heat into consider that the Arctic basin is almost entirely
the upper atmosphere, darkening Gondwana’s skies enclosed by land. River water streaming off the land is
for years to come. floating on top of the heavier saltwater, forming what
This large-scale destruction of plant life will take with may have been one of the biggest lakes the planet has
it the entire regional food chain, wiping out numerous ever seen. Great for swimming, too, as the water is a
dinosaurs. The sulphate aerosols are relatively short- pleasant 23°C. The other end of the world would also

90 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

“Doggerland has
recently been revealed as
a prehistoric paradise”
have been experiencing swimsuit weather.
All this warmth is the result of a big rise in
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, though no one
knows what caused it. One possibility is intense
volcanic activity, another that deposits of solid
methane sitting at the bottom of the sea melted,
releasing their load in one great gassy belch. Or maybe
Antarctica’s permafrost thawed, releasing a big puff
of CO2.
Either way, after millions of years of gradual
warming, temperatures suddenly jumped by at least
5 °C in just 20,000 years. It is a tough time for life on the
sea floor, where an extinction was going on, but life on
land seems to be flourishing. If you drop down in the
NASA/RAPID EYE/ISTOCK

lush forests of South-East Asia, you might be lucky

enough to spot a new class of mammal that has only
just evolved: the primates. They look a bit like tarsiers
or bush babies, eat insects, and in the very, very distant
future will give rise to the only animal to have occupied
all four corners of the planet: us.
You wouldn’t have wanted to visit Our species is also the only one with the power to
Earth 165 million years ago, during trigger something even greater than the PETM: a
the biggest volcanic apocalypse ever similar amount of warming but 100 times faster. The
PETM is firmly in Earth’s past – temperatures returned
to normal after about 200,000 years – but some say it
is a window onto the future.

5 MILLION YEARS AGO:

T H E F L O O D T H AT F I L L E D
THE MEDITERRANEAN

Standing at Punta de Tarifa, the southernmost point

of mainland Europe, the mountains of Morocco are
clearly visible across the Strait of Gibraltar. This busy
stretch of water, just 14 kilometres across at its >

Chapter 6 | Deep time | 91

narrowest, is the gateway between the Atlantic Ocean 74 ,0 0 0 YEARS AG O:
and the Mediterranean Sea, and the closest thing to a SUPERVOLCANO
border between Europe and Africa.
Visiting it 5.4 million years ago, the picture is very The first sign that something had gone terribly wrong
different. The mighty Atlantic is there, but the Med is was a deep rumbling roar. Hours later the choking ash
nowhere to be seen. In its place is a vast basin, glittering arrived, falling like snow in a relentless storm that
with salt crystals and dappled with lakes of hypersaline raged for over two weeks. Despite being more than
water. This land, connecting what would become 2000 kilometres from the eruption, hominins living as
Europe and Africa, is 2.7 kilometres below sea level at its far away as eastern India would have felt Toba’s fury.
lowest point. It’s quite a spectacle: Earth’s lowest land Toba is a supervolcano on the Indonesian island of
today is the Dead Sea basin, a mere 430 metres below Sumatra. It has blown its top many times but this
sea level. eruption, 74,000 years ago, was exceptional. Releasing
You have arrived at the height of the Messinian 2500 cubic kilometres of magma – nearly twice the
Salinity Crisis, when tectonic movements have closed volume of Mount Everest – the eruption was more than
the Strait of Gibraltar, cutting off the Mediterranean. In 5000 times as large as the 1980 eruption of Mount St
the hot and dry climate, it took perhaps 1000 years for Helens in the US, making it the largest eruption on
the sea to evaporate almost completely. Its remains can Earth in the last 2 million years.
still be found today, under the sea floor and along its The disaster is particularly significant since it
shores in the form of thick deposits of salt and gypsum. occurred at a crucial period in human prehistory –
The basin didn’t stay desiccated for long. As time when Neanderthals and other hominins roamed much
rolled on, the climate grew cooler and wetter, and rivers of Asia and Europe, and around the time our direct
flowing into the basin turned it into a type of wetland ancestors, Homo sapiens, were first leaving Africa to
called a lago mare, or “lake sea”. But to the west, a ultimately conquer the world. Yet with no recent
cataclysm was brewing. eruptions for easy comparison, the full extent of its
If you want to see it, hop back in your time machine impact on early humans has been shrouded in mystery.
and set the dial for 5.33 million years ago. A
combination of tectonic subsidence, erosion and sea- 8500 YEARS AGO:
level rise is just about to let the sea back in. A PARADISE LOST
The Zanclean flood – named after the geological age UNDER THE NORTH SEA
in which it happened – probably started slowly,
gradually filling about 10 per cent of the basin over From the Victorian pier at Cromer on the east coast of
thousands of years. But we arrive in time for the ending England, the North Sea looks bleak and uninviting. But
– a deluge of biblical proportions. nip back 10,000 years – the blink of an eye in geological
For some reason the rate of inflow suddenly soared, time – and it is a very different sight. At the dawn of the
filling the basin completely in the space of a few Mesolithic, as the last ice age was coming to an end, sea
months, raising the Mediterranean by about 10 metres levels were significantly lower than today, and Britain
a day. Every second a billion cubic metres of water roars was connected to mainland Europe by a fertile plain
past, 5000 times more than the Amazon today. The stretching as far as Denmark. Welcome to Doggerland.
sight is awe-inspiring. In all, 3 million cubic kilometres Long considered a featureless land bridge,
of Atlantic water floods in, gouging a channel 250 Doggerland has recently been revealed as a prehistoric
metres deep and 200 kilometres long that can still be paradise of marshes, lakes, rivers – and people. In 2008,
seen on the bed of the Strait of Gibraltar. University of Bradford archaeologist Vincent Gaffney

92 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

and his colleagues used seismic survey data to
reconstruct this lost world beneath the North Sea. The
result is a map covering 23,000 square kilometres – an
area roughly the size of Wales.
HOW TO
TAKE THE
Top of the list for the discerning time traveller, says
Gaffney, is a ride over the Outer Silver Pit Lake, now a
depression in the floor of the North Sea. Fed by the river
Thames to the east and the Rhine to the west, this is
where Doggerland’s people congregate to fish, hunt
and gather berries. Today, trawlers occasionally dredge
up traces of these people – a spear point fashioned from
deer bone, for example. But little else is known of them.
What we do know is that they were victims of climate
LONG VIEW
change. As the world warmed and the glaciers melted, The inability to engage with longer-term
sea levels rose by some 2 metres every century, gradually
engulfing low-lying areas. Over a few thousand years, causes and consequences underpins some of
Doggerland transformed into an archipelago. the world’s most serious problems: climate
Then came the wave. Set the time machine to 8150
years ago and you will witness something that few change, biodiversity collapse, antibiotic
people have ever seen, and fewer still lived to tell the resistance, income inequality, the risk of nuclear
tale: a mega-tsunami. This was triggered by a massive
undersea landslide off the coast of modern-day war, and more. But humans can overcome this
Norway, known as the Storegga Slide. propensity for short-term thinking.
A 2014 study estimated that roughly 3000 cubic
kilometres of sediment collapsed, probably triggered
by an earthquake, generating a tsunami that surged T IS well established that people have a bias
across what was left of Doggerland. According to John towards the present. We focus on salient
Hill at Imperial College London, who led the research, if attractions in the moment at the expense of
you were on Scotland’s east coast – or preferably the health, well-being and financial stability of
hovering above it – you’d see it battered by 12-metre- our future selves, community or descendants.
high waves. Some estimates have waves exceeding In business and finance, this bias surfaces as
25 metres crashing into the Shetland Islands. short-sighted corporate decisions. In politics, it
Any remaining islands of Doggerland would have is the way governments ignore the lessons of
been devastated and catastrophically flooded, leading history and the future consequences of their
Hill and others to suggest that the Storegga Slide policies. And on slow-burning problems like
sounded the death knell for its people. But others climate change, it manifests as the unwillingness to
suspect that the people had long ago fled to higher, make small sacrifices today that could make a major
drier ground – some to the Scandinavian hills, some to difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next
France and the Netherlands, and others to what is now quarter’s profit, winning the election or sating some
the British coast. Either way, the result was a cultural other near-term desire.
separation of Britain and mainland Europe that would These time-blinkered perspectives cannot be blamed
last for centuries. ❚ on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our >

Chapter 6 | Deep time | 93

psychological biases, or “temporal habits”, play a major invention that has discouraged a long view among
role. People’s reluctance to delay gratification is the corporate leaders ever since. Studies suggest quarterly
most obvious example, but there are others. One is the reporting correlates with reductions in R&D spending,
“availability heuristic”, which describes how the most patents and hiring – all things that can bring longer-
accessible information in the present skews decisions term prosperity, albeit at short-term cost.
about the future. Another is “salience bias”, where loud But the problem goes far beyond business. When
and urgent distractions seem disproportionately New York introduced scorecards for cardiologists,
important, nudging people to ignore longer-term which publicised their surgery mortality rate, many
trends that arguably matter more. doctors stopped operating on sicker, riskier patients.
The human mind is bad at noting slow change. When It seems difficult to see how these temporal habits,
it comes to creeping environmental transformations, and the stresses that exacerbate them, might be
we can develop a form of collective amnesia called broken. Yet various studies suggest that it is possible to
“shifting baseline syndrome”. It is so named because encourage a longer perspective.
each new generation can believe the state of affairs they We each have a “timeview” – a way of thinking about
encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people our place within the past, present and future that
today, for example, can remember a time with bug- defines our priorities and decisions. Some individuals
splattered car windscreens after long drives. Children, are more long-minded than others, and some societies
on the other hand, have no idea that insect abundance and cultures too. But timeviews aren’t fixed.
has plummeted. When it comes to the inability to delay gratification,
A final, subtle temporal habit involves the words we studies suggest that social circumstances can foster a
use to describe the past or future. In English and other longer view. This dovetails with the research of the late
languages, we talk about the longer-term future as Geert Hofstede, a psychologist who was at Maastricht
being “far” or “distant”, as if it were a foreign land. University in the Netherlands, and who showed that
None of these temporal habits would be impossible more individualist nations, like the US or Australia,
to mitigate if brought into the open. However, they have less of a long-term orientation than collectivist
have also been amplified by a host of subtle incentives societies like Japan or China. Hofstede’s descriptions
and deterrents called “temporal stresses” that are broad brushstrokes, maybe even stereotypes, but
collectively discourage the long view. he nonetheless argued that his surveys reflect a
Let’s consider one example, from the business world. country’s dominant cultural norms.
In the early 20th century, the New York Stock Exchange Whereas Japanese people might tend to “see their life
made a seemingly reasonable request of listed as a very short moment in a long history of mankind”,
companies: every three months, they would share for example, people in the US are more likely to
updates with the market. By 1931, 63 per cent of firms prioritise other guiding frameworks, such as “liberty
had complied. This was quarterly reporting, a temporal and justice for all”. This US mindset has many positives,

94 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

“More individualist nations
have less of a long-term view
than collectivist societies”
but it may have fostered a free-market culture that concerned with maintaining tradition or family values.
enabled corporate short-termism to develop unchecked. Finally, present-oriented people are, obviously, strongly
Japan, by contrast, is known for a business culture that influenced by what they do and experience in the
places more emphasis on longevity and tradition. moment.
There is also tentative evidence that some languages Our timeviews can be coloured by optimism or
encourage a longer view. It is far from established that pessimism, too. So, for example, people scoring high on
language can direct people’s thoughts, as some have “present-hedonism” in the inventory are more focused
claimed – but it does ask us to express concepts in on near-term pleasures, while a strong “present-
different ways, possibly steering cultural norms. People fatalism” result implies a lack of agency: a doomist
whose tongues have a weak future tense – such as outlook that can lead to apathy and hopelessness.
German, Japanese, Mandarin and most of the Importantly, we can change our time perspective.
Scandinavian languages – talk of the future as closer. To People given mindfulness training reduced their
describe tomorrow’s weather in Mandarin, you would present-fatalism scores. Researchers have also boosted
say míng tian xia yu – “tomorrow fall rain”, not people’s future perspective by asking them to write
“tomorrow it will rain”, which is a strong future tense. what they would want said about themselves in their
Weak future speakers are more likely to put money into eulogy, or to imagine being 90-years-old, in a rocking
savings and are more likely to exercise. chair, reflecting on their life choices.
Research has described a correlation with pro- This “perspective taking” seems to be a powerful way
environmental behaviours, while other studies of fostering a longer view. The idea is to encourage
revealed that corporations led by speakers who use a people to mentally time travel to reflect on the
weak future tense displayed a greater willingness to experience of specific individuals in the past or future –
save and to invest in R&D. It is possible that other themselves or others. When researchers asked people
cultural differences played a role, but the correlation to reflect on what past generations had sacrificed –
has been observed in a number of studies. fighting wars or enduring hardship, for instance – they
Even within a single culture, nation and language, were more likely to feel a sense of moral obligation
some people are more or less present-focused than towards future generations.
others – and this may be a learned behaviour. Some Viewing the world through a temporal lens could
people are more past-oriented, some present-focused help us heed the lessons of history, navigate the most
and others are more future-motivated. serious challenges we face today and look ahead to
Very broadly, people with a pronounced future possible futures with greater clarity, generosity and
perspective are more likely to be forward-planners, to even hope. Ultimately, if we want to chart a route out of
floss and eat healthily, to do well academically and to our tumultuous century – steering our fate rather than
embrace pro-environmental attitudes. Past-oriented stumbling into tomorrow – we need to unlock a longer
people are more likely to be (small-c) conservatives, view. ❚

Chapter 6 | Deep time | 95

WILL TIME END?
It is a disturbing prospect, more chilling even than the end of our universe,
because in most of the ordinary scenarios of cosmic doom there remains the
comforting possibility that a new universe might rise from the ashes of the
old. But if time itself can end, then we surely have no get-out clause.

HERE are a couple of ways the universe of the universe, or the “big freeze”.
might end. “The expansion could “It’s not really clear what happens to time at that
continue forever, or it could stop and point,” says Mack. “In principle, time still exists, it still
reverse,” says Katie Mack at North keeps passing, but there’s no future direction
Carolina State University, author of The anymore.” With nothing able to cause anything else,
End of Everything (Astrophysically any definition of time rooted in causality ceases to have
speaking). any meaning.
That second, “big crunch”, scenario has There are more exotic alternatives. Perhaps the
generally been more favoured. On its accelerating strength of dark energy will continue to
own, the density of matter in the increase and tear everything – galaxies, stars, atoms –
universe seems to suggest that the pull of gravity will apart before we reach a heat death, a scenario known as
eventually overwhelm space-time’s expansive the “big rip”. Even more dramatically, quantum field
momentum. The universe will reach a zenith of theory might allow for vacuum decay, in which a
expansion and then begin contracting towards bubble of a different kind of space pops up in our
a kind of big bang in reverse. universe and devours it.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the end of time. A sub- Whether any of these things truly mean the end,
genre of big-crunch scenarios proposes that the however, depends on the beginning. Most
universe bounces back. In such “cyclic” cosmologies, cosmologists believe that our universe underwent
time has no obvious end, but is constantly recreated – a cosmic inflation, which is very hard to stop. In this
process that presumably accounts for our own big bang. scenario, universes keep budding off from one another
Recent discoveries have swung the pendulum in to form a “multiverse” of causally disconnected
favour of eternal expansion, however. A few billion universes. If this is the reality, it seems unlikely that
years ago, the expansion of the universe started ours was the “original” universe, and implausible to say
accelerating, spurred on by a mysterious agent known that time began – or will end – with it.
only as dark energy that overwhelmed gravity’s Of course, all of this depends on time having any
contracting force. Wind this forward, and the space true cosmic meaning. What if, as some physicists
between galaxies becomes so stretched that they speculate, time isn’t real or fundamental to the
gradually lose all causal contact with one another. The universe, but is just of relevance to us to make sense of
universe gets ever emptier and nothing useful can everything? In that case, time will be over long before
happen anymore – a scenario known as the heat death the universe ever is. ❚

96 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Time

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