A timeless universe is hard to imagine, but not because time is a

technically complex or philosophically elusive concept. There is a

more structural reason: imagining timelessness requires time to pass.
Even when you try to imagine its absence, you sense it moving as
your thoughts shift, your heart pumps blood to your brain, and images,
sounds and smells move around you. The thing that is time never
seems to stop. You may even feel woven into its ever-moving fabric
as you experience the Universe coming together and apart. But is that
how time really works?

According to Albert Einstein, our experience of the past, present and

future is nothing more than ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’.
According to Isaac Newton, time is nothing more than backdrop,
outside of life. And according to the laws of thermodynamics, time is
nothing more than entropy and heat. In the history of modern physics,
there has never been a widely accepted theory in which a moving,
directional sense of time is fundamental. Many of our most basic
descriptions of nature – from the laws of movement to the properties
of molecules and matter – seem to exist in a universe where time
doesn’t really pass. However, recent research across a variety of fields
suggests that the movement of time might be more important than
most physicists had once assumed.

A new form of physics called assembly theory suggests that a moving,

directional sense of time is real and fundamental. It suggests that the
complex objects in our Universe that have been made by life,
including microbes, computers and cities, do not exist outside of time:
they are impossible without the movement of time. From this
perspective, the passing of time is not only intrinsic to the evolution of
life or our experience of the Universe. It is also the ever-moving
material fabric of the Universe itself. Time is an object. It has a
physical size, like space. And it can be measured at a molecular level
in laboratories.
The unification of time and space radically changed the trajectory of
physics in the 20th century. It opened new possibilities for how we
think about reality. What could the unification of time and matter do
in our century? What happens when time is an object?