A Physicist Made a 'Mini Universe' in The Lab to Check Time Really Exists

Key Points:

• Physicist Giovanni Barontini created a 'mini-universe' using about 24,000 rubidium atoms cooled to near absolute zero to experimentally explore the nature of time emerging from within a system rather than as an external clock.
• The mini-universe, formed as a Bose-Einstein condensate split into observed ('bright') and unobserved ('dark') sectors, showed time emerging from entropy exchange as atoms oscillated between these sectors, analogous to dark matter and dark energy in the real Universe.
• This entropy-based internal time flows in one direction, providing a natural ordering of events without an external parameter, supporting the idea that time may arise from changes within a quantum system rather than existing fundamentally.
• The experimental setup allows physicists to simulate cosmological phenomena like Big Bang and Big Crunch cycles or black hole boundaries by adjusting parameters, offering a valuable platform to probe quantum gravity and the unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity.
• Barontini’s work, published in Physical Review Research, provides new insights into how time might be understood in quantum gravity, potentially enabling dynamics to be described without relying on conventional external time.