The universe might have a fundamental clock that runs very, very fast!

Like a metronome marking a musician’s beat, a fundamental cosmic clock may keep time throughout the universe, but if such a clock exists, it ticks extremely rapidly. In physics, time is typically thought of as a fourth dimension, but some physicists have speculated that time may be the result of a physical process, such as the ticking of a built-in clock.

If the universe has a fundamental clock, it must be running faster than a trillion trillion trillion times per second, according to a theoretical study. In particle physics, tiny fundamental particles can acquire properties through interactions with other particles or fields, particles acquire mass, for example, by interacting with the Higgs field, a kind of molasses that permeates all of space. Perhaps the particles could experience time by interacting with a similar type of field, according to physicists.

Time is a puzzling concept in physics: two key physical theories clash on how they define it. In quantum mechanics, which describes tiny atoms and particles, time is just there, it’s fixed, it’s a background, but in the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, time changes in strange ways. A clock near a massive object runs slower than one farther away, so a clock on Earth’s surface lags behind one aboard an orbiting satellite, for example.

The researchers considered the effect a fundamental clock would have on the behavior of atomic clocks, the most accurate clocks ever made. If the fundamental clock ticked too slowly, these atomic clocks would be unreliable because they would not be in sync with the fundamental clock, as a result, atomic clocks would run at irregular intervals, like a metronome that cannot keep a steady beat. But until now, atomic clocks have been very reliable, allowing physicists to limit the speed at which that fundamental clock should work, if it exists at all.

Physicists suspect that there is an upper limit to the precision with which seconds can be divided; quantum physics forbids any time interval less than about 10-43 seconds, a period known as Planck time. If a fundamental clock exists, Planck time might be a reasonable rate for it to run.

To test that idea, scientists would need to increase their current limit on the clock’s ticking rate, that billion trillion trillion times per second number, by a factor of about 20 billion. That seems like a big gap, but for some physicists, it’s unexpectedly close. The Planck regime is generally a far cry from what physicists realize, however it is believed that there is probably no fundamental clock in the universe, but rather a variety of processes that could be used to measure time.

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