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Nicola Bortolotti at the Enrico Fermi Museum and Research Centre (CREF<\/a>) in Rome led a team that arrived at an unsettling conclusion. <\/p>\n They found that time, the very thing clocks measure, may carry a tiny built-in jitter no instrument will ever scrub away.<\/p>\n The jitter is small, almost laughably small. But the team argues it lives in the universe itself, not in some flaw of our equipment.<\/p>\n The strange nature of quantum<\/p>\n At very small scales, a particle does not sit at one place with one set of properties. <\/p>\n It exists as a smear of possibilities, each weighted by probability. Physicists describe that smear with a mathematical object called a wavefunction.<\/p>\n Then something interacts with the particle, or someone runs a measurement. The smear vanishes into a single outcome. <\/p>\n That sudden settling has a name, wavefunction collapse, and after nearly a century of debate, no one has fully agreed on what triggers it.<\/p>\n Two models in competition<\/p>\n Most interpretations of quantum mechanics shuffle the same equations and argue over meaning. In the 1980s, a few physicists tried something different.<\/p>\n They suggested that wavefunctions collapse on their own, spontaneously, with no observer required.<\/p>\n Two of those proposals stand out today. One is the Di\u00f3si-Penrose model, which has long argued that gravity<\/a> itself drags quantum systems into definite states. <\/p>\n The other is Continuous Spontaneous Localization. Both predict subtle effects that careful experiments could, in principle, detect.<\/p>\n Linking gravity to time<\/p>\n Bortolotti and his colleagues went after a specific question. If spontaneous collapse really happens, would it leave a trace on the flow of time?<\/p>\n The Di\u00f3si-Penrose model already had a known connection to gravity. An older paper<\/a> laid that groundwork decades ago. Continuous Spontaneous Localization showed no such bridge.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two ideas had developed in parallel, addressing the same puzzle from different angles, and no one had tied the second one to the structure of spacetime in a quantitative way.<\/p>\n That is what the new calculation does. The team observed the random tiny disturbances of Continuous Spontaneous Localization. <\/p>\n If real, they would also produce tiny ripples in the gravitational field around that matter. Ripples in gravity become ripples in spacetime, thus creating ripples in time.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we did was to take seriously the idea that collapse models may be linked to gravity. And then we asked a very concrete question: What does this imply for time itself?\u201d said Bortolotti.<\/p>\n Debating the importance of size<\/p>\n A wobble in spacetime translates into a wobble in the ticking of any clock. Bortolotti and his colleagues calculated how large that wobble must be if either model describes nature.<\/p>\n Their answer sits far below anything modern instruments can register. Even the best atomic clocks are nowhere near the predicted floor.<\/p>\n \u201cThe uncertainty is many orders of magnitude below anything we can currently measure, so it has no practical consequences for everyday timekeeping,\u201d said Catalina Curceanu, a co-author on the team.<\/p>\n Bridging two differing physics<\/p>\n So why bother, if no clock will ever feel the effect? Because the result speaks to one of the deepest open problems in modern science: how to fit quantum mechanics together with gravity.<\/p>\n Quantum theory treats time as a fixed background, ticking along regardless of what particles do. <\/p>\n Einstein\u2019s relativity treats time as something that bends and stretches under mass and energy. Those two views have refused to mesh for a century.<\/p>\n The new calculation hands physicists a small but very real bridge. It says one of the more speculative attempts to fix quantum mechanics, if correct, would reach into gravity\u2019s territory and leave an imprint on time<\/a> itself.<\/p>\n Future implications for time<\/p>\n Until this study, the connection between Continuous Spontaneous Localization and spacetime fluctuations had not been worked out. That gap is now closed, and a concrete prediction has taken its place.\u00a0<\/p>\n The collapse models are no longer purely philosophical alternatives to standard quantum theory. <\/p>\n They make a numerical claim about the smallest possible uncertainty in time, one that could be tested if clock technology pushes deep enough into precision territory.<\/p>\n For the wider field of quantum gravity, the result offers a new entry point for researchers. <\/p>\n They can now ask whether other collapse-style theories also leave fingerprints on time, and whether any of those fingerprints sit closer to what an experiment might reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n The everyday world keeps its trustworthy seconds. Wristwatches, GPS, all of it. The deeper question of what time really is just got a little sharper.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Physical Review Research<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The world\u2019s best clocks keep improving. They lose less than a second over the entire age of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":950827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[74,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-950826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116551339757129736","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/950827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}