{"id":227005,"date":"2025-12-12T13:05:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T19:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/time-might-not-exist-and-were-starting-to-understand-why"},"modified":"2025-12-12T13:05:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T19:05:25","slug":"time-might-not-exist-and-were-starting-to-understand-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/time-might-not-exist-and-were-starting-to-understand-why","title":{"rendered":"Time might not exist \u2014 and we\u2019re starting to understand why"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/time-might-not-exist-and-were-starting-to-understand-why.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Consider two events, A and B, such as flashes of light made by two sources in different places.<\/p>\n<p>Cause and effect means there are three possibilities: 1) Flash A happened before flash B, and via some mechanism, could have triggered B; 2) Flash B happened before Flash A and could have triggered it; 3) Neither one could have triggered the other because they are too far apart in space and too close in time for a triggering signal to have been sent from one location to the other.<\/p>\n<p>Now, Einstein\u2019s Special Theory of Relativity states that all observers, no matter how fast they\u2019re moving relative to each other, see light travelling at the same constant speed.<\/p>\n<p>This strange but simple fact can lead to observers seeing events happening in different orders.<\/p>\n<p>For option above, two observers moving relative to each other close to the speed of light might disagree on the ordering of flashes.<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully, there\u2019s no danger of an effect coming before its cause (known as a \u2018violation of causality\u2019) since the events are too far apart for either to cause the other.<\/p>\n<p>However, what if options and coexisted in a quantum superposition? The causal order of the two events would no longer be fixed.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/time-might-not-exist-and-were-starting-to-understand-why\">Continue reading \u201cTime might not exist \u2014 and we\u2019re starting to understand why\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Consider two events, A and B, such as flashes of light made by two sources in different places. Cause and effect means there are three possibilities: 1) Flash A happened before flash B, and via some mechanism, could have triggered B; 2) Flash B happened before Flash A and could have triggered it; 3) Neither [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":542,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1617,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-physics","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/542"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}