Time may be an illusion derived from quantum entanglement A new physics study suggests time may emerge from entanglement, challenging the idea that it exists independently. Edited By: Joshua Shavit Time has always seemed like the one thing physics could count on. Matter changes, stars die, particles flicker in and out, but time keeps moving. That assumption sits so deep in modern science that it often passes without notice. Now a new theoretical study argues that time may not exist in the way physicists have long treated it. Instead, the work suggests time could emerge from quantum entanglement, the strange connection that links separate systems at the microscopic level. In this view, time is not a universal stage on which events unfold. It appears only when one quantum system is used to track another. The paper, published in Physical Review A, revisits the Page and Wootters mechanism, a proposal first introduced in 1983. The idea has hovered for decades at the edges of debates over quantum gravity and the foundations of physics. By building an explicit model, the authors argue that the mechanism can recover both ordinary quantum motion and, in the right limit, the familiar time of classical physics. That matters because physics still holds two incompatible pictures of time. In quantum mechanics, time is treated as an external parameter, something imposed from outside the system. It is the ruler used to measure change, but it is not itself an observable inside the theory. General relativity treats time very differently. There, time is woven into spacetime and can stretch or slow depending on gravity and motion. “It seems there is a serious inconsistency in quantum theory. This is what we call the problem of time,” Alessandro Coppo of Italy’s National Research Council said. Where time goes missing The mismatch