33rd Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics at ASU
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
I was invited by the local committee at ASU to present a poster for Frozen Time Theory at the 33rd Texas Symposium on Relativity and Astrophysics
Texas Symposium Poster
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
33rd Texas Symposium at ASU
Since 1963, the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics has been one of the most important international conferences in astronomy and physics. Traditionally, it has moved around the globe and has taken place in different cities every two years.
What if Time was Frozen
The Problem of Time At the frontier of physics, the greatest unresolved tension is not a particle or a force but time itself.
General relativity fuses time with space into geometry; the “river of time” is replaced by the static fabric of spacetime. Quantum theory, in contrast, requires time as an external parameter in its Schrödinger evolution. Canonical quantum gravity deepens the problem: the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, has no time variable at all. Meanwhile, lived experience insists that time flows. We experience a single present, remember a past, and anticipate a future. Physics describes a frozen architecture; consciousness demands a moving story. This is not a minor technical difficulty—it is the central conceptual fissure in modern thought. Frozen Time Theory (FTT) addresses this issue directly.
Frozen Time The Book Coming Soon
Frozen Time Theory Explained
What began as a metaphysical intuition has evolved into a mathematically formalized, Lorentz-invariant quantum gravitational theory. Frozen Time Theory (FTT) now stands at the intersection of consciousness studies, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, offering a novel perspective on the nature of time, observation, and reality. This article retraces the intellectual path that brought FTT from poetic speculation to a testable scientific framework—highlighting the philosophical, theoretical, and mathematical milestones that have shaped its emergence.
Frozen Time Theory Overview
Abstract
I propose “Frozen Time Theory” (FTT) in which the universe is fundamentally timeless and complete, and experiential time arises from a single consciousness—here called the Selector—traversing a static space of admissible four-dimensional configurations (“frames”). In this view, reality consists of (i) a timeless structure of frames constrained by physical lawfulness (conservation, locality, decoherence, relativistic invariance), and (ii) a single, underlying observer that orders some subset of these frames into a coherent narrative of past, present, and future.
The apparent flow of time and the arrow of increasing entropy emerge from the Selector’s trajectory through frames that preserve records, maximize predictive compression, and respect thermodynamic and information-theoretic monotones. Quantum probabilities are reinterpreted as weights over possible Selector-trajectories rather than stochastic events in an external time, and wavefunction “collapse” is replaced by the experienced restriction to a single, record-compatible path. Ontologically, the multiplicity of observers is demoted to perspectival structure: all individual minds, including artificial agents, are local stories within one consciousness experiencing many variations of self. I articulate core postulates of FTT, spell out what cannot be fundamentally true if FTT is correct (e.g., objectively flowing time, many independent consciousnesses, observer-independent collapses), and sketch how standard physics can be recovered as an effective, within-frame description.
The result is not yet a mathematical Theory of Everything in the narrow sense, but a candidate theory of everything about existence: a coherent framework that unifies mind, time, and law into a single ontological picture.
The Core Postulates of FTT
1) Ontic Frame Space: There exists a timeless set of frames, each representing a complete configuration of the universe. Frames do not come into being or cease to exist; they are ontically given.
2) Selector: There is a fundamental Selector associated with conscious awareness that orders frames into a sequence. This ordered sequence is what an observer experiences as time, memory, and personal history.
3) Single Consciousness, Many Perspectives: At the deepest level, there is one underlying consciousness. What are ordinarily called different observers correspond to distinct perspectives or loci within the frames visited by the Selector, rather than to ontologically independent consciousnesses.
4) Probabilistic Selection Rule: The frequency with which the Selector encounters frames of a given type is governed by a rule that can be represented as a measure on frame space. When coarse-grained, this rule is expected to reproduce the Born rule probabilities of quantum mechanics.
5) Local Effective Dynamics: Although the frame space itself is static, typical sequences of frames exhibit patterns that are, to excellent approximation, described by local dynamical laws, including the unitary evolution of the quantum state and the Einstein field equations for the spacetime metric.
6) No Ontic Collapse: There is no physical collapse of the quantum state in time. What is ordinarily called wavefunction collapse corresponds to an update in the experienced sequence of frames, as the Selector continues only through frames in which a definite outcome is recorded.
7) Holographic and Compression Aspects: The redundancy and structure of frame space permit holographic-style compression: many distinct experiential sequences can be encoded in fewer fundamental degrees of freedom. Holographic dualities are interpreted as different coordinate systems on the same underlying frame space.
8) Emergent Causality: Causation is not fundamental but emerges as a pattern in the ordered sequence of frames. Regularities in the Selector’s navigation of frame space are experienced as causal laws and arrows of time.