Scientist creates ‘mini‑universe’ to measure time without a clock
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2026/scientist-creates-miniuniverse-to-measure-time-without-a-clockOpen linkView original on lemmy.zipSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.ziphttps://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2026/scientist-creates-miniuniverse-to-measure-time-without-a-clockOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip
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I know Rick and Morty gets a lot of flak for being cringe, but the episode where Rick's essentially car battery dies is hilarious. He has an entire universe inside of his ship's battery and inside of it there are little devices that he gave them to use to generate power that he extracts. They stopped using them. He goes inside to diagnose, only to find that a genius inside of his world made a device that works entirely the same as his own. But it stops working. So the pair and their company go inside that battery universe to trouble shoot, only to find it happened there too!
Why should we worry about keeping time when we can just outsource the problem?
In the beginning, the universe was created. This made many people very angry, and is widely considered to be a bad move.
If you want to make a clock, you must first invent the universe.
By some definition, anything that allows measuring time is a clock. It might be a weird clock, but clock still.
So they are not actually measuring time. If you look at the actual article (which I linked in another comment), what they did is experimentally assign a number to the different states of their system just based on that state, but in such a way that these numbers naturally order the states. Then they did the math to predict how their system behaves using this number as if it were time, and those predictions match what they experimentally observed.
The point is that in this experiment the "time" is an emergent property of the system, and not something presumed. So this a stepping stone towards determining if the real time that we all experience is a similar emergent phenomenon, or at least helps other physicists investigate this possibility.
The "mini-universe" stuff is pop-sci BS.
That's exactly how a clock works - we assign meaning to a state (arm position) and then tie that to time with a battery or winder.
Big hot ball high we call day. Big hot ball gone we call night. We make stick with shadow. We split path shadow takes. It is known.
Self emergent clock is still a clock in my books? Just a rather fundamental clock. Clock that makes the time it is measuring? Then again what else is say even an atomic clock. temporal spacing emerging from the changes of state of a physical phenomenon. Solar clock ain't measuring time either. It measures orbital position of Earth and Sun. We then assign these numbers to these changes of patterns. Then we note, oh hey these make up useful repeating patterns.
I'm sure in some goes way over my head way, this is different. However... if the end result (even without directly measuring time) is being able to tell change in time/temporal ordering etc., it is a clock. By certain (at minimum my own definition) of clock. Nice thing about definitions. One can even make ones own.
I am just going off the abstract, but they do not claim and I see no reason to believe that the parameter they constructed has a straightforward relationship with wall-clock time. It's just a number where you can construct equations that make this number "look like" time. There is no claim that this number is related to "true" time.
Put another way, I see no reason that an interval over this parameter should correspond to any interval of "real" time.
Sounds like a lamport clock or logical clock. Interesting to see it used outside of computer science.
Yes, that seems like a rough analogy at least
He should have called it a teenyverse.
Miniverse!
If something is moving, time is involved.
These are words that are possible to put together in a headline, but don't actually make any sense.
Terry Pratchett stuff
Builds a cage. Shakes it, things inside rattle. Leaves it be, things inside do not rattle.
What am I missing? ELI5
So here is the actual article and not the pop-sci woo: https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/1h9j-df4k
What's interesting to me from the abstract is the fact that they experimentally construct an ordered parameter, derive an effective Schroedinger equation that uses this parameter as if it were time, and then show that this equation actually does properly describe the experimentally observed evolution of the system.
That is an issue if someone figures out how to do actual vacuum decay! Rather than simulate it in ultracold gasses.