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Time Is Just F(r)iction
Description
For decades, one of physics' strangest open questions has been whether time is fundamental at all — or whether it only emerges once you stop looking at the whole universe and start looking at how its parts talk to each other.
In this episode of Heliox, we dig into a real 2026 paper out of the University of Birmingham, where physicist Giovanni Barontini built a working miniature universe from 24,000 ultracold rubidium atoms, split it in two with a wall of light, and used the flow of entropy across that wall to build a working clock — one that kept perfect time even when the lab's own stopwatch couldn't.
We walk through the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, why time vanishes from it, the "movie reel in a sealed tin" analogy for a static universe, and how this experiment translated 60-year-old theoretical debates into something you can photograph in a lab. And we end somewhere unexpectedly tender: on what it might mean, for you personally, if time really is just the record of things exchanging information with each other.
📖 Read: https://helioxpodcast.substack.com
🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd5BbCEeC3Z6dp-nNjWRbBw
🎙️Available for Broadcast: https://exchange.prx.org/group_accounts/253118-heliox_where_evidence_meets_empathy
References
Testing the problem of time with cold atoms
This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy
Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.
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Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.
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