Time might not exist

The BBC article (below) omits mentioning that Time is a human invention that – at least – originated in the Sumerian civilisation. Humans have a habit of making mistakes. Hence, Time might indeed not “exist”.

The real problem might be answering the question: what is Time ?

The Sumerian civilisation used Earth’s orbits around the Sun as a way of calculating time (eg, 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days, 52 weeks, 12 months, years). Hence, Time looks different for any other planet in our brain, our Solar system, the Milky Way, and Universe. Hence, Time might not exist.

Clearly, the human notion of Time does not equal universal Time. Moreover, even Time on planet Earth is restricted to a geographical time zones. Hence, SpaceTime. If and when Light has a constant speed then Light would – probably – equal universal Time.

However, several scientific articles suggest that Light may not have a constant speed (eg, Science Daily-1999), New Scientist-2004, Live Science-2013, Wiki-Variable speed of light).

In my view, it seems futile arguing that the Arrow of Time might not exist. Hence, the arrow of time “exists”.

In my view, the cycle of Life (eg, birth, growth, death, entropy) appears universal (rather than Time).

Probably, the phrase Time was – and still is – based on a human need and want for having Control. Subsequently, Time became a human belief. Moreover, animals do not have belief systems, and would thus never believe in Time. Probably, only Light defines their needs (eg, eating, sleeping).

Perhaps, the phrase Time should be replaced by the Circle of Life, including the Arrow of Time. Please find below a diagram that appeared in my mind shortly before finding my sleep:

Circle of Life (2025) by Jennifer Hudson
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-artist, Wiki-Lion King, Wiki-song

Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless in quotes or stated otherwise.

BBC: Time might not exist – and we’re starting to understand why

BBC subtitle: The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets

By: Prof. Jim Al-Khalili
Date: 7 December 2025

“The nature of time is one of the most profound and longstanding problems in physics – one that no one can agree on. From our perspective, time seems to steadily progress forward with each tick of the clock.

But the closer we look, the more bizarre time becomes – from equations that state time should flow as freely backwards as it does forwards, to the strange quantum realm where cause and effect can flip on their heads.

Could it even be that time itself is an illusion?

What makes time so confounding is that we have three very different ways of defining it, which don’t easily fit together.

The first definition comes from the equations that describe how things change over time.

We have many such equations describing everything from the motion of tennis balls to the decay of atomic nuclei. In all these equations, time is a quantity, referred to as ‘coordinate time’.

Time is no more than a mathematical label to which we can assign a particular value.

The second definition of time comes from Einstein’s theories of relativity, where it’s a dimension in addition to the three we’re familiar with. It’s a direction in four-dimensional spacetime.

Our picture of reality then becomes one in which all times – past, present and future – are equally real and co-exist, just as all points in space are equally real.

More than that; time has a deep connection with gravity according to General Relativity, where the shape of spacetime is influenced by gravity.

Much of the effort at the forefront of theoretical physics over the past half-century has been devoted to unifying General Relativity with the strange world of quantum mechanics.

Mathematical frameworks that attempt to do this are known as theories of quantum gravity.

But how do we reconcile these two notions of time – the quantum mechanical idea, in which time is a mere parameter, versus the relativistic idea that time is a dimension in spacetime?

I call this ‘the first problem of physical time’.

Time in quantum gravity

The reason it’s so difficult to reconcile quantum mechanics with General Relativity is that their mathematics are fundamentally incompatible.

Not only that, but quantum effects primarily govern very small scales such as subatomic particles, while gravity impacts much larger scales such as planets and galaxies, so trying to create an experiment where both scales are not only relevant, but can be accurately measured, has proved exceedingly difficult.

Early attempts at unifying a quantum description of reality with the 4D spacetime of General Relativity led John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt to come up with an equation – the Wheeler-DeWitt equation – in 1967, in which time no longer appears at all.

What they were attempting to describe is the quantum state of the entire Universe, independent of time. This, many physicists have suggested, means that time might just be an illusion.

But should we be so radical or dismissive about time? We’ve come a long way since then, so how does time enter current attempts to develop a theory of quantum gravity?

Here, things get very murky.

Some approaches still start from something like traditional coordinate time, but then add time again as part of a spacetime with more dimensions than the four we’re used to.

In other approaches, time emerges from more fundamental concepts about the Universe.

Time might even turn out to be ‘quantised’, meaning that if we were to zoom down to small enough scales, we would see both time and space as lumpy. So, we end up with quanta (atoms) of spacetime.

This brings us to the third definition of time, stemming from thermodynamics, which describes the properties of large numbers of particles treated in terms of macro quantities like heat, temperature and pressure.

Here, time is neither a dimension nor a label, but a direction – pointing from the past to the future.

This is typically phrased as being in the direction of increasing entropy: our unwinding Universe, balls rolling downhill, ice cubes melting in a glass of water and so on.

However, despite all the irreversible processes we see around us, the fact is that, in all the fundamental equations of physics, reversing the direction of time doesn’t prevent the equations from working.

That is, time could point either way and we wouldn’t be able to tell the future from the past. Yet we see a clear difference between the past and the future.

This is ‘the second problem of physical time’. How do we reconcile the fact that our equations work just as well whichever way time is running with the irreversibility of time that we experience in the world?

For this, we might have to look towards the quantum domain and the strange phenomena of entanglement.”

Source:

• BBC Science Focus, 7 December 2025: Time might not exist – and we’re starting to understand why