The Fallacy of Absolute Time: Time as an Emergent Property

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  Science and Technology on Wed, Sep 30th, 2026 by The Economist
      Locales: UNITED KINGDOM, FRANCE, ITALY

The Fallacy of Absolute Time

One of the primary "mistakes" Rovelli identifies is the lingering conceptual attachment to time as a universal, flowing river. Even within the framework of general relativity, which posits that time is malleable and linked to gravity, many physicists still treat time as a background coordinate—a stage upon which the universe performs.

Rovelli argues that time is not a fundamental component of the universe's architecture. Instead, he proposes that what we perceive as time is an emergent property resulting from our macroscopic perspective and our ignorance of the microscopic details of the world. By treating time as a primary variable, physicists may be chasing a ghost. Rovelli suggests that the laws of the universe can be described without the variable of time entirely, focusing instead on the correlations between different physical variables. This shift from a "temporal" view to a "relational" view suggests that the universe is not a sequence of events unfolding in time, but a vast network of events occurring in relation to one another.

Relational Quantum Mechanics

Expanding on this, Rovelli delves into the misconceptions surrounding quantum states. The traditional view in quantum mechanics often suggests that a particle possesses a specific set of properties—such as position or velocity—regardless of whether it is interacting with another system. Rovelli challenges this notion through the lens of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM).

According to RQM, physical properties do not exist in isolation. An object does not have a state "in itself"; it only manifests a state relative to another object during an interaction. In this framework, there is no such thing as an absolute, observer-independent state of a system. This perspective resolves several paradoxes of quantum mechanics by asserting that the "collapse of the wave function" is not a global event but a relative one. For one observer, a system may have collapsed into a definite state, while for another, it remains in superposition. The "mistake" here is the assumption that there is a single, objective reality that can be described without specifying the relation between the observer and the observed.

The Granularity of Space

Further extrapolating from these concepts, Rovelli addresses the structural nature of space. While general relativity describes space-time as a smooth, continuous fabric, Rovelli's work in Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) suggests a fundamentally different reality. He posits that space is quantized—composed of discrete "grains" or loops of gravitational field.

If space is granular, the notion of a "point" in space is a mathematical convenience rather than a physical reality. This implies that there is a minimum possible volume and area, beyond which the concept of distance ceases to have meaning. The error in conventional thinking, Rovelli suggests, is the reliance on the continuum. By attempting to merge a smooth spacetime (General Relativity) with a quantized world (Quantum Mechanics), physicists encounter the mathematical singularities and infinities that have plagued the search for a Theory of Everything. The solution, he argues, lies in accepting that the fabric of the universe is fundamentally discrete.

Conclusion: A Shift in Paradigm

Carlo Rovelli's critique is not merely a technical correction of equations, but a call for a philosophical pivot. He suggests that the path forward in physics requires abandoning the intuitive notions of a clockwork universe and a stable, independent reality. By embracing a relational world—where time is emergent, space is granular, and properties are interactive—physics can move past the current impasse. The objective is not to find a single equation that describes everything from a fixed vantage point, but to understand the complex web of relations that constitute the physical world.