Time moving forward might just be a glitch caused by the universe being bad at copying its own homework.
arXiv · March 13, 2026 · 2603.11571
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Why it matters
It proposes that at the deepest quantum level, cause and effect are completely reversible and move back and forth. We only experience a 'past' and a 'future' because of decoherence—essentially, the arrow of time is just a record of the universe's 'imperfect causal echoes' as they blur out.
From the abstract
We formalize the concept of subtime -- a reversible mode of information interchange within entangled systems -- and show how classical time emerges as an asymptotic limit through decoherence. Building on the photon clock model, in which a single photon confined between two ideal mirrors creates an alternating causality regime, we develop a process-theoretic formalization using the Oreshkov--Costa--Brukner framework extended with an explicit time-reversal duality condition. We introduce Perfect I