Physicists create a miniature universe in which time emerges from entropy, without a clock
A University of Birmingham experiment with 24,000 ultracold atoms shows time can be measured internally rather than by an external clock
A physicist at the University of Birmingham has built a miniature universe from about 24,000 atoms cooled to billionths of a degree above absolute zero and shown that a form of time can emerge from changes inside the system without an external clock. The findings, published in Physical Review Research, offer experimental support for the idea that time may not be a fundamental feature of reality but something that arises from the relationships and changes within the universe itself.