https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-origin-of-time-bootstrapped-from-fundamental-symmetries-20191029/
An excerpt from the above link follows; “The physicists employed a strategy known as the bootstrap<https://www.quantamagazine.org/using-the-bootstrap-physicists-uncover-geometry-of-theory-space-20170223/>, a term derived from the phrase “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” (instead of pushing off of the ground). The approach infers the laws of nature by considering only the mathematical logic and self-consistency of the laws themselves, instead of building on empirical evidence. Using the bootstrap philosophy, the researchers derived and solved a concise mathematical equation that dictates the possible patterns of correlations in the sky that result from different primordial ingredients. “They’ve found ways of calculating things that just look totally different from the textbook approaches,” said Tom Hartman<https://physics.cornell.edu/thomas-hartman>, a theoretical physicist at Cornell University who has applied the bootstrap in other contexts. Eva Silverstein<https://sitp.stanford.edu/people/eva-silverstein>, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the research, added that the recent paper by Arkani-Hamed and collaborators is “a really beautiful contribution.” Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work, Silverstein and others said, is what it implies about the nature of time. There’s no “time” variable anywhere in the new bootstrapped equation. Yet it predicts cosmological triangles, rectangles and other shapes of all sizes that tell a sensible story of quantum particles arising and evolving at the beginning of time. This suggests that the temporal version of the cosmological origin story may be an illusion. Time can be seen as an “emergent” dimension, a kind of hologram springing from the universe’s spatial correlations, which themselves seem to come from basic symmetries. In short, the approach has the potential to help explain why time began, and why it might end. As Arkani-Hamed put it, “The thing that we’re bootstrapping is time itself.” Wyttenbach’s work on an alternate nucleon model considering SO(4) physics also has suggested a temporal nature of time in lieu of a linear scale starting at the “beginning of the universe some 14 billion years ago. Bob Cook
