What if time is not a fundamental part of the universe, but something that emerges from the changes taking place inside it? A physicist at the University of Birmingham has created a miniature universe in the laboratory that offers a surprising new way to investigate this possibility.

Using thousands of atoms cooled to temperatures barely above absolute zero, Professor Giovanni Barontini demonstrated that the passage of time can be measured without relying on an external clock. Instead, a form of time emerges naturally from the behavior of particles within the experimental system.

The findings, published in Physical Review Research , provide experimental evidence for an intriguing idea in theoretical physics: Time may not be an essential ingredient of reality.…