{"id":246223,"date":"2026-10-30T19:05:35","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T00:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/physicists-created-a-tiny-universe-and-watched-time-emerge-without-a-clock"},"modified":"2026-10-30T19:05:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T00:05:35","slug":"physicists-created-a-tiny-universe-and-watched-time-emerge-without-a-clock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/physicists-created-a-tiny-universe-and-watched-time-emerge-without-a-clock","title":{"rendered":"Physicists created a tiny universe and watched time emerge without a clock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Scientists have created a miniature universe in the laboratory that could help answer one of the biggest mysteries in physics: What is time, and where does it come from? Using 24,000 ultracold atoms, a University of Birmingham researcher built an isolated quantum system that repeatedly expands and contracts, mimicking the Big Bang and a possible Big Crunch. Remarkably, the experiment showed that time could emerge from changes happening inside the system, without relying on an external clock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have created a miniature universe in the laboratory that could help answer one of the biggest mysteries in physics: What is time, and where does it come from? Using 24,000 ultracold atoms, a University of Birmingham researcher built an isolated quantum system that repeatedly expands and contracts, mimicking the Big Bang and a possible [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246223","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\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}