time vanishing
In several contemporary physical frameworks, time is treated not as a basic variable but as something that “drops out” or “emerges” from deeper, timeless relations. In general relativity (Einstein, 1915), time is not absolute but part of spacetime: a dynamic geometry shaped by mass–energy. The Einstein field equations don’t privilege a single, universal “now.” The consequence is that there’s no external clock; time is relational. Time ceases to be a universal variable and becomes a coordinate within a 4D manifold that can be “sliced” in many ways.
When quantum mechanics is combined with general relativity, you get an equation where the time derivative disappears, this is sometimes called the “frozen formalism” of quantum cosmology: the universe’s wavefunction does not “evolve” in any external time. Time “vanishes” from the fundamental level — only correlations remain. The arrow of time emerges statistically from entropy increase. At the micro-level, fundamental laws (e.g., Newtonian, quantum, relativistic) are time-symmetric — they don’t care if t runs forward or backward. The direction of time thus arises from boundary conditions (low-entropy past) rather than any intrinsic flow → Time’s asymmetry is emergent, not fundamental.
Emergent Time Theories
| Framework | Core Idea | Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Thermal Time Hypothesis (Rovelli & Connes) | Time is a measure of change in a system’s statistical state — an emergent parameter from thermodynamics. | The universe has no fundamental clock; time arises from entropic relations. |
| Relational Quantum Mechanics (Rovelli) | States are defined only in relation to others; no global time exists, only internal correlations. | “Becoming” is replaced by a web of mutual change. |
| Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) | Spacetime is quantized; at Planck scales, there’s no smooth metric and thus no continuous time. | Time “appears” when discrete spin networks transition between configurations. |
| Emergent Gravity (Verlinde, Padmanabhan) | Spacetime and gravity emerge from microscopic information degrees of freedom. | Time may be a macroscopic ordering parameter of information processing. |
| Holographic Principle / AdS–CFT | 4D spacetime emerges from boundary quantum information. | “Bulk” time can emerge from entanglement structure on a lower-dimensional boundary. |
Philosophical Resonances
| Tradition | Parallel Idea | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Bergson’s Duration | Time as qualitative continuity; physics only measures its shadows. | Prefigures the “emergent time” view: lived time is real; measured time is abstraction. |
| Buddhist Dependent Origination | No independent temporal flow; only interdependent arising. | Time as consequence, not cause — aligns with relational physics. |
| Process Philosophy (Whitehead) | Actual occasions create time through becoming. | Time = the rhythm of creative advance. |
| Information-Theoretic Cosmology (Wheeler’s “It from bit”) | Reality is informational; “before” and “after” are orderings of information updates. | Time = sequence of informational events. |
Physicists sometimes literally call time a “vanishing variable” in certain Hamiltonian formulations. In the ADM (Arnowitt–Deser–Misner) formalism of general relativity, spacetime is decomposed into “space” plus “time” slices, but the overall dynamics is reparameterization-invariant — meaning the equations are unchanged if you redefine the time coordinate.
→ The theory itself doesn’t tell you what time is, only how things change relative to one another.
Time as an Emergent Memory
- Select: the system distinguishes differences (microstates).
- Change: transitions accumulate correlations (entropy).
- Reconstruct: continuity (time) is inferred from remembered correlations.
Thus time = memory of change — an emergent index of correlation stability. This aligns both with Bergson’s duration (the felt continuity of change) and with Rovelli’s relational time (the network of correlations). In deep physics, time may vanish as an independent variable — yet reappear as an emergent rhythm of correlation and memory. What we call “the flow of time” could simply be the way the universe remembers itself.