Ask A Genius 1422: Emergent Time & Degenerate Matter

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/11

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner critique a recent Physics Letters D article, cautioning against confirmation bias while exploring degenerate matter, emergent time, and cosmological information. They discuss quantum gravity, information containment, and consciousness, arguing that time equals evolution as complexity and entropy rise across collapsing and expanding universes.

Rick Rosner: I sent you that link to a Yahoo article, which was based on a publication in Physics Letters D. The arguments presented there appear sound, especially because they align with our current understanding. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: However, we should be cautious: agreeing with a conclusion because it matches our own expectations risks circular reasoning. It is not enough to say, “I am right, so they are right.” The agreement may be meaningful, but it still requires critical scrutiny.

That said, I recognize the possibility that I could be mistaken. That possibility is always on the table. Still, I am speaking here from the standpoint of current models and frameworks in physics that support this line of reasoning.

Now, let’s discuss degenerate matter. In astrophysics, degenerate matter refers to a highly dense state of matter—typically found in stellar remnants like white dwarfs and neutron stars—where the pressure resisting further collapse is provided by quantum degeneracy pressure, not thermal motion. Degenerate matter is not “devoid of information” in an absolute sense, but quantum mechanical principles highly constrain its microstates. In extreme cases, such as black holes, information becomes inaccessible to external observers due to the event horizon.

These objects represent various stages of gravitational collapse:

• Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar objects where hydrogen fusion never ignites.
• White dwarfs are supported by electron degeneracy pressure.
• Neutron stars are supported by neutron degeneracy pressure.
• Black holes occur when mass collapses beyond the Schwarzschild radius, forming a singularity (or, more realistically, an extremely dense core potentially describable by quantum gravity).

Depending on the mass and internal dynamics, a collapsing object may not form a classical black hole but instead reach some equilibrium or experience quantum gravitational effects that prevent complete collapse. Hypothetical models suggest that under certain conditions, gravitational collapse could be reversed—possibly giving rise to phenomena like black hole bounce models or white holes (though these remain speculative).

Jacobsen: Now to the core idea: the relationship between information, time, and cosmological evolution.

Rosner: The concept of “information pressure” is not standard in physics but can be interpreted as a metaphor for the increase in entropy or information complexity over time. As a proto-universe or a high-density quantum gravitational state transitions into a more expanded and differentiated universe, it gains complexity and entropy. This transition is not only spatial but also temporal—in other words, time emerges as the system evolves from a low-information (or low-entropy) state to a higher one.

In some approaches to quantum cosmology, time does not pre-exist but emerges from the ordering of events—what is called “emergent time.” According to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, for instance, time disappears at the most fundamental level, and what we experience as time arises from correlations between quantum states.

The specificity of a universe—its particular arrangement of matter and energy—can be thought of as proportional to its informational content. A system of 10⁸⁰ particles contains far more information (or configurational complexity) than a two-particle system. Greater specificity, in this sense, reflects increased entropy, structure, and differentiation.

As a system evolves from a degenerate, highly symmetrical state (low information) to a more structured, broken-symmetry state (high information), each step in that process can be understood as a “tick” of time. The evolution from degeneracy to specificity is the unfolding of time. This is not merely a metaphor. In specific physical interpretations, time is nothing over and above the succession of state transitions.

So, time is not a background river through which matter flows—it is the sequence of changes itself. Think of it like a flipbook animation: the act of flipping is not time; the ordered images are time when viewed in succession. Similarly, it is not an external mechanism that drives time forward but rather the intrinsic ordering of increasingly specific physical states.

Therefore, these are not two separate things—time and physical evolution. Time is physical evolution. The “deeper” explanation lies in understanding how complexity, entropy, and quantum entanglement give rise to temporality. That is where the deeper physics still needs to be worked out.

That article—yeah, it is from Yahoo—but I bet it barely mentions information, if at all. I should probably look up the original paper in Physics Letters D, but I likely will not be able to access it because it is probably behind a paywall.

Still, this entire subject is about information—about what it takes for a system to contain information. Information, by definition, must be both relevant and intelligible within the system. However, when we talk about information, we usually overlook the containing framework—because that framework is often apparent to us.

Take a football score, for instance. It makes sense because it is contextualized within the framework of the game—and we care about the game. Maybe we even have money on it. However, when we think of information, we usually focus on the output—the possible outcomes—not on the framework itself.

We are so accustomed to living inside informational frameworks that we rarely reflect philosophically on what it even means for a system to “contain” information. We are immersed in it constantly.

We certainly do not think about what it takes for a universe to contain information. However, the deeper structure of cosmology and fundamental physics revolves around the concept of information. Moreover, it is not always elegant. We want to think of information as something pure and clean—a quantum event happens, and now we have a unit of information. A thing occurred.

A particle decayed at a specific time. It adopted a particular chirality or spin. An outcome was selected. That is quantum mechanics in action—randomness within the framework of probability amplitudes.

However, we do not want to look at the bigger picture—the vessel in which all these events unfold—because that is where the metaphysical and philosophical complications emerge. We encounter challenging questions, such as the nature of consciousness.

What if—quite plausibly—the universe embodies consciousness in some form? No one wants to hear that because it starts to sound like “woo.” However, if you argue that consciousness is not metaphysical fluff—that even trees, rocks, or butterfly wings participate in a technically describable form of consciousness—then you are committing to a significant claim.

You have to defend that position rigorously. You must explain how consciousness arises mechanistically. Moreover, many scientists will instinctively recoil. Hard scientists often do not want to engage with topics they perceive as soft or speculative—like consciousness.

That kind of resistance makes sense, even if it is short-sighted. 

Jacobsen: We have got time, space, materiality, energy, and information. Out of these and other foundational categories in physics or philosophy, which can be broken down into more fundamental constituents?

Rosner: That is the real question—and the real problem. Because not all of these can be reduced any further, physics tends to prefer simplicity. Think of Feynman diagrams: a photon interacts with an electron—clean, visual, simple.

However, when you try to apply that level of diagrammatic clarity to something like information or consciousness, the simplicity collapses. You hit conceptual walls. We do not yet have the tools—either mathematically or conceptually—to categorize those categories in a clean and consistent manner.

But if I told you—and if the equations of quantum physics tell us—that everything is connected, that nothing is straightforward, that would be accurate. You can, with high probability, treat things as effectively simple for practical purposes. However, if you want to be a completist, if you want to account for everything thoroughly, you must consider the entire universe. Nobody wants to do that. People wish to clean up, localize, and simplify phenomena and interactions.

The irony is that you need an enormous system—the entire universe—to contain all these seemingly simple interactions. They only appear simple because we are isolating them from the broader, entangled context in which they occur. Everything is part of a larger whole.

One basic example—something you first encounter in high school physics—is a quantum particle in a potential well. That potential well might model an electron bound to a proton in a hydrogen atom. The electron orbits due to electromagnetic attraction, and since the proton is over 1,800 times more massive, the electron effectively orbits it. The system requires energy input to remove the electron from that well—to ionize the atom.

But that atom, that two-particle system, exists only because a much larger universe supports it. That context—cosmic, entangled, full of fields and fluctuations—is often ignored. However, it is vital. Our physical models have been biased toward locality, and that makes sense—local physics works. We have had considerable success in developing local models that explain both local and some global behaviour.

Newtonian gravitation is a good example. It is entirely local in its formulation. You do not need general relativity to calculate how a ball falls three feet to the ground. Relativistic effects are negligible at that scale.

You only start needing general relativity when dealing with more extreme scenarios—like GPS satellites. They orbit Earth about 20,000 kilometres up. Because they are higher in the gravitational potential well, their clocks run slightly faster than clocks on Earth’s surface. General relativity accounts for that difference. But Newton didn’t have to deal with any of that. His framework was good enough for terrestrial physics.

So yes, we prefer local models. They’re easier to handle. But unfortunately—or fortunately—the time has come to embrace more global perspectives. If we don’t, AI might end up doing it for us. And honestly, we probably do not want that outcome either.

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