What if time isn’t real? Physicists built a tiny quantum universe with 24,000 ultracold atoms and found a shocking truth: Time could create itself

In a groundbreaking experiment, physicist Giovanni Barontini sought to decipher the origins of time by creating a mini-universe through a Bose-Einstein condensate close to absolute zero. In this unique setting, events analogous to the Big Bang and Big Crunch unfolded, while an innovative entropic clock monitored the natural progression of disorder, indicating that time may be an illusion arising from complex internal dynamics.