For many years, scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of time and it seemed like they are getting close to it. Various research has been made recently where scientists used quantum entanglements to discover this mystery.
In an article published on Core Spirit, Brian Swingle of Harvard and Brandeis universities said that the time can somehow emerge from "timeless degrees of freedom" using entanglements.
Quantum entanglement sounds like a big word that is so difficult to understand. Entanglement occurs when scientists have a partial knowledge of the state of two systems. The concept, however, is simple and can be explained using circular and square cakes as a metaphor, Quanta Magazine explains.
The circular cake and the square cake represents the two possible states. If these two are independent of each other, that means they don't give useful information about each other. Thus, scientists do not really know what the real shapes of each state is.
However, if they are entangled, they give information about each other and improve the knowledge scientists acquire about each state. Thus, if scientists know that the first state is circle, then the second one is circle as well. The same thing happens if the first state is square, then the second state is square as well.
By using these entanglements, scientists get closer in unboxing the nature of time. Mark Van Raamsdonk, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia said that scientists now understand that the space-time is just a "geometrical representation" of these entanglements in the underlying quantum systems.
Another clue comes from a research by Don Page and William Wooters which appears on arXiv. They discovered that a globally static entangled system can have a subsystem that which looks like it is evolving from the point of view of an observer that is inside it.
They further explained that the system called the "history state" has another subsystem that is entangled with what you might call a clock. The state of the subsystem changes because it depends on the state of where the clock points its hands. Despite this, however, the system and the clock does not change.
Swingle explains this theory saying that time does not really exist, only the state. In simpler terms, the idea of time only emerges for the subsystem.
