http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/time-is-created-by-the-observer-argues-new-research
Time Might Not Exist Outside of Our Minds, Propose Scientists
Experiencing time is one of the weird parts of our lives. Often, there's just not enough of it. Other days, there's way too much time on our hands. And no matter what, it keeps going forward, like an inexorable tugboat, pulling us through emotional experiences and physical transformations. We are left with memories of what has been, unable to change anything, unable to jump forward and see what'll happen next.
Yet, such a common experience of time may not be what it appears to be. A new paper published in the October issue of the Annalen der Physik, known for publishing Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, argues that time is not some force outside of us, but rather a phenomenon created by the observer. Basically, you make your own time.
The paper's co-authors, biologist Robert Lanza and physicist Dimitriy Podolskiy, point out the conundrum that despite how one-directional experiencing time feels to us, most physicists think that time should work the same way forward and backward. Unraveling this mystery leads us down the rabbit hole into the contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
One popular view in the physics community is that time itself is the product a quantum gravity-related "decoherence" or "wave function collapse". This process is described through the Wheeler-DeWhitt equation, which is what Lanza and Podolskiy tested in their research and found that the gravity's effects are too slow to explain the emergence of the "arrow of time". Instead, the researchers proposed that time's creation is dependent on the observer.
