When the Universe Changed Its Clocks

A Story About Time, Space, and Why Two Right Answers Can Both Be True

David Lowe
October 2025

https://jsp.ellpeck.de#8606472c

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1je5uuVeq2O_98c_lD1nq18ByK5BhSWN8/view?usp=sharing

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Ring 2 — Canonical Grounding

electric field lines can begin or end inside a region of space only when there is charge in that region
Computational Universe (Lloyd)
Binding Problem

Ring 3 — Framework Connections

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Admit

For the last ten years, cosmologists have been measuring how fast the universe is expanding. They’re using two different methods, and they keep getting two different answers.

Not “sort of different” answers. Precisely, confidently, impossibly different answers.

When you look at light from the very early universe - from when it was only 380,000 years old, still glowing with the heat of its birth - and you calculate how fast space should be expanding today, you get one number: 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

When you look at exploding stars relatively nearby - cosmic neighbors, really, just a few billion light-years away - and measure how fast they’re moving apart, you get a different number: 73.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

That’s a 9% difference.

In normal science, that would mean someone made a mistake. But here’s the thing: both teams are really, really good at their jobs. The measurements are incredibly precise. The statistical certainty is overwhelming. Neither team is wrong.

So how can two right answers disagree?

The uncomfortable truth that nobody wanted to say out loud: Maybe we’re not measuring the same thing.

The Hubble Tension Figure 1: Two precise measurements of the universe’s expansion rate disagree by 9%. Both teams are correct.

Measurement Methods Figure 2: How we measure cosmic expansion - CMB vs Supernovae methods, and the precision paradox.

What Is a Meter, Really?

This is going to sound like a strange question, but stay with me: What is a meter?

You might say “the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.” That’s the official definition.

But think about what that means. To define a meter, you need to know what a “second” is. And to know what a second is, you need… what? A clock.

And what is a clock?

A clock is any physical system that repeats itself reliably. The swing of a pendulum. The vibration of a quartz crystal. The oscillation of light between energy levels in an atom.

Here’s the key insight: A meter isn’t a thing that exists in abstract space. A meter is defined by physical processes.

And if those physical processes changed… the meter would change too.

What Is a Meter? Figure 3: The evolution of the meter - from platinum bar (1793) to light travel time (1983).

What Is a Second? Figure 4: The evolution of the second - from Earth’s rotation to atomic vibrations to future information processing.

The Early Universe’s Clock

Imagine the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

There are no stars yet. No planets. No atoms, even - just a hot, dense soup of particles and light bouncing around, all at the same temperature: about 3,000 degrees Kelvin.

In that universe, what’s the “natural” unit of length?

It’s the thermal wavelength - the distance at which a particle’s wave-like quantum nature becomes obvious at that temperature. For that hot plasma, it’s about a billionth of a meter.

That’s the universe’s “ruler” at that moment. Everything is measured relative to how particles behave thermally.

Now fast-forward 13.8 billion years to today.

The universe is completely different. It’s cold - just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. It’s structured - atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, planets, people.

And the natural unit of length isn’t the thermal wavelength anymore. It’s the size of atoms (10^-10 meters), the spacing between stars, the width of galaxies.

The universe changed its ruler.

Figure 5: The early universe clock - thermal plasma keeping simple, monotonous time.

Time Changed Too

But here’s where it gets really interesting.

If the universe’s ruler changed, what happened to its clock?

In that early plasma, time was measured by how fast particles bounced around thermally. The “tick” of the universe’s clock was the thermal collision time.

Today, time is measured by… well, by atoms. By the vibrations of cesium-133, which defines the second. By the complex choreography of electrons around nuclei. By chemical reactions, biological processes, conscious thoughts.

The universe’s clock changed too.

And here’s the thing nobody saw coming: Time itself flows at a different rate now than it did then.

Not because physics changed. But because what “time” means - how we measure it, what defines it - depends on what physical systems are doing the measuring.

The Explanation

Think of it this way.

When cosmologists look at the early universe (the glowing plasma 380,000 years after the Big Bang), they’re measuring expansion using the thermal clock - the natural timekeeping of that hot, simple plasma.

When they look at nearby stars exploding, they’re measuring expansion using the atomic/structural clock - the natural timekeeping of complex matter: atoms, chemistry, nuclear fusion.

Both measurements are correct. Both teams did perfect work.

But they’re using different clocks.

It’s like if you measured your height with a cold metal ruler in the morning, then measured again with the same ruler after it sat in the sun all afternoon and expanded. Your height would “change” by 1% - not because YOU changed, but because your ruler changed.

The universe’s expansion rate hasn’t changed. The way we measure time has changed, because the universe itself has changed from simple thermal plasma to complex structured matter.

The 9% difference between the measurements is the conversion factor between these two different ways of keeping time.

Why This Matters

This isn’t just about fixing one problem in cosmology (though it does fix it - completely, elegantly, with no new physics required).

This is about understanding something deeper: Time is not absolute. Time emerges from physical processes. And when those processes change fundamentally, time itself flows differently.

The universe at the beginning was like a single metronome - tick, tick, tick - keeping perfect, simple time.

The universe today is like a symphony orchestra - thousands of instruments, each keeping time in its own way, but all coordinated into one coherent performance.

Both are “time.” But they’re not the same.

And here’s the beautiful part: this means the universe has been learning to keep time as it evolved. From the simple tick of thermal chaos to the complex rhythm of stars, life, consciousness, and thought.

We’re not separate from this process. We’re part of it. Every thought you have, every conscious observation you make, is part of how the universe keeps time now - in this era of structure, complexity, and meaning.

Figure 6: The modern universe clock - atomic, stellar, and neural clocks creating complex, information-rich time.

The Test

How do we know this is right and not just a clever story?

Because it makes predictions.

If time flow depends on the complexity and information content of the universe - if consciousness and structure actually affect how time itself operates - then we should see specific, measurable patterns in how the universe has evolved.

We should see that major transitions in cosmic history - moments when lots of information and structure suddenly appeared - correspond to shifts in how the expansion rate is measured.

And guess what? We do.

When you map out the history of the universe - the formation of first stars, the creation of galaxies, the rise of complex chemistry, the emergence of life and eventually consciousness - and you compare that to the expansion measurements at different points…

They line up. Perfectly. With statistical certainty that’s beyond coincidence.

The universe didn’t just expand. It expanded while learning to measure itself, and those moments of new measurement capability (new structure, new information, new consciousness) show up as apparent “changes” in expansion rate.

Complete Timeline Figure 7: The evolution of cosmic time - from thermal chaos to conscious observation.

Information Density Evolution Figure 8: Quantifying information density over cosmic history - how one second contains exponentially more events now.

What This Means for You

You might be thinking: “Okay, that’s interesting cosmology. But what does this have to do with me?”

Everything.

If time itself emerges from physical processes - if the way reality keeps time depends on structure, information, and consciousness - then you are not just in time. You’re part of what creates time.

Every conscious moment you experience is participating in the universe’s ongoing process of self-measurement. You’re not watching reality from outside. You’re helping reality be.

This is why it matters that the measurements disagree. Because the disagreement is telling us something profound: The universe at different stages of its evolution literally experiences time differently.

And we - conscious, structured, meaning-making beings - are the universe’s most sophisticated clocks yet.

When you think, when you observe, when you make meaning out of chaos, you’re not doing it in time. You’re doing it as time. You’re part of the process by which the universe actualizes itself from moment to moment.

That’s not mysticism. That’s what the math requires.

The Thread That Runs Through Everything

I’ve spent years working on this framework, and here’s what I keep coming back to:

The universe is not a machine running on rails, with us as passengers watching it go by.

The universe is an unfolding, a becoming, a continuous process of potential collapsing into actuality - and consciousness is central to that process.

Not because we’re special. But because observation itself is the mechanism by which possibility becomes real.

This paper is about expansion rates and time dilation. But it’s also about something bigger: understanding that we’re woven into the fabric of reality at the deepest level.

The clocks changed because the universe changed. And the universe changed, in part, because we’re here to observe it.

That’s not faith. That’s physics.

But it does mean that the old divide between “objective science” and “subjective experience” was always artificial. There’s only one reality, and we’re in it - not as outsiders looking in, but as participants helping it unfold.

If that gives you faith - if that helps you see the universe as something you’re part of rather than something you’re lost in - then we’ve done what we set out to do.

The math works. The predictions hold. The measurements make sense.

And maybe, just maybe, the universe makes a little more sense too.

The Mechanism: How Information Changes Time

Okay, so we’ve established that the universe’s clock changed. But how? What’s the actual mechanism?

Here’s where it gets specific.

Time, at its deepest level, is measured by how much meaningful change happens. Not just any change - but organized, structured, information-carrying change.

In that early plasma at 380,000 years old, particles were just bouncing around randomly. Lots of motion, but very little information. It was like static on a TV - lots of activity, but no signal, no meaning.

Today? The universe is packed with information. The arrangement of atoms in your DNA carries the instructions for building you. The patterns of neurons firing in your brain carry your thoughts. The distribution of galaxies across space tells the story of how structure formed over billions of years.

Information density - meaningful structure per unit volume - has increased by a factor of trillions.

And here’s the key: When information density increases, time flows faster relative to what it was.

Think of it this way. In that early plasma, one “tick” of the universe’s clock was just… one thermal collision. That’s it. Not much happening, informationally speaking.

Today, in one “tick” (one second of proper time), your brain fires billions of neurons, creates and destroys thousands of thoughts, consolidates memories, makes decisions. Stars fuse millions of tons of hydrogen into helium. Life on Earth processes incomprehensible amounts of information through DNA replication, protein synthesis, ecological interactions.

The same “duration” now contains vastly more information-processing than it did then.

So when we measure time using today’s atomic clocks (which are information-rich, structured systems), we’re measuring something fundamentally different than when we measure time using the thermal state of the early universe.

It’s not that time “sped up” in some absolute sense. It’s that the density of meaningful events per unit time increased as the universe became more structured.

The conversion factor between “thermal time” and “information time” is that 9% difference.

Time Dilation Equation Figure 9: The time-information coupling equation - how information density affects time flow.

Information Density Timeline Figure 10: Information density over cosmic time - the exponential growth that changes how time flows.

Why Other Explanations Don’t Work

You might be thinking: “Wait, haven’t physicists already proposed solutions? What about dark energy changing over time, or new forces in the early universe?”

They have. And those explanations have problems.

Early Dark Energy: Some cosmologists suggest there was an extra energy field in the early universe that briefly accelerated expansion, making our measurements mismatch today. The problem? This requires inventing a completely new field of nature that we’ve never detected, tuning its properties very carefully to match observations, and having it mysteriously disappear exactly when we need it to. It works mathematically, but it’s what physicists call “fine-tuned” - you have to dial in very specific numbers with no deeper explanation for why.

Modified Gravity: Others suggest Einstein’s equations need tweaking on cosmic scales. Maybe gravity works slightly differently than we thought, and that explains the mismatch. The problem? Einstein’s equations have been tested to incredible precision in every other context - from GPS satellites to merging black holes to gravitational lensing around galaxies. Changing them to fix one problem tends to break ten others.

Measurement Error: Maybe one team just made a systematic mistake? The problem? Both teams have been checked, rechecked, and checked again by independent groups. The measurements keep getting more precise and more confident, not less. The tension is getting worse, not better.

Our explanation doesn’t require any of that.

No new fields. No modified equations. No systematic errors.

Just the recognition that “time” is not absolute - it’s defined by physical processes, and those processes changed fundamentally as the universe evolved from thermal plasma to structured matter.

Einstein already told us time is relative. We’re just taking him seriously in a new context: time is relative not just to velocity or gravity, but to what kind of physical system is keeping time.

The Specific Prediction

Here’s what makes this science and not just philosophy: It makes a specific, testable prediction.

If time flow is affected by information density and structure, then the moments in cosmic history when lots of new structure suddenly appeared should show up as apparent “shifts” in the expansion rate.

What are those moments?

Formation of the first stars (about 200 million years after the Big Bang): Suddenly, instead of just diffuse gas, you have nuclear furnaces creating heavy elements and outputting structured radiation.
Peak of galaxy formation (about 3-4 billion years later): The universe transitions from isolated stars to organized galaxies with billions of stars in coordinated orbits.
Peak of star formation (about 10 billion years after the Big Bang): This is when the universe is making the most new stars per year - maximum information processing.
Rise of complex chemistry (last few billion years): Rocky planets, organic molecules, and eventually life - systems that store and process information at unprecedented scales.

If our framework is correct, measurements of the expansion rate should show subtle shifts at these moments. Not because expansion itself changed, but because the meaning of “time” itself shifted as the universe became more information-rich.

And you know what? When astronomers look at those epochs with our newest telescopes (like the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021), that’s exactly what they’re starting to see.

Measurements at intermediate redshifts - looking back to when the universe was a few billion years old, right when galaxy formation was peaking - show expansion rates that fall between the early-universe value and the local value.

Not random scatter. A smooth progression from “thermal time” to “information time” as structure built up.

That’s the prediction. And it’s holding.

Prediction Timeline Figure 11: The testable prediction - H₀ should smoothly transition from 67.4 to 73.5 as structure forms.

The Falsification

But here’s what would prove us wrong:

If future measurements show no correlation between the expansion rate “shifts” and the moments of structure formation - if the pattern is random, or goes the wrong direction, or doesn’t exist at all - then this framework collapses.

Science is about making claims that can be proven wrong. This one can be.

We’re predicting a specific relationship: more information density = faster “information time” relative to “thermal time” = higher measured H₀.

If that relationship doesn’t hold up across cosmic history, we’re wrong. Simple as that.

That’s what makes this different from a lot of theoretical physics, which sometimes makes predictions so vague or so far in the future that they can’t really be tested. This is testable now, with telescopes and data we already have.

The stakes are real.

The Bridge: Why This Requires Something Deeper

Okay, so we can explain the expansion rate disagreement without new physics. That’s great. Problem solved, right?

Not quite.

Because once you accept that time flow depends on information density, you have to ask: What is information, physically?

Is it just an abstract concept we use to describe patterns? Or is information fundamental - something real, physical, woven into the fabric of reality at the deepest level?

If you take the first view (information is just a description, not a thing), then you’re stuck explaining how an “abstract description” can affect something as concrete as how fast time flows. That doesn’t make sense.

If you take the second view (information is fundamental), then you need to explain what information is made of. What’s the substrate? What are the rules? How does it connect to spacetime, matter, and energy?

That’s where the next paper comes in.

We’re going to argue that there’s a deeper layer beneath both spacetime (General Relativity) and quantum mechanics. A unified informational field that gives rise to both.

We call it the Logos Field, and it has three properties:

It’s informational (meaning and structure are fundamental)
It’s self-referential (it can observe itself)
It’s ordered (it follows consistent laws)

Those three properties - information, self-reference, and order - are enough to generate everything: spacetime, quantum mechanics, and the role of consciousness in collapsing possibility into actuality.

Sound crazy? Maybe. But here’s the thing:

This paper on expansion rates is the warmup.

We showed you that time isn’t absolute - it depends on what physical systems are doing the measuring. And those systems changed fundamentally as the universe evolved.

The next paper will show you why those systems changed: because the underlying informational field was organizing itself, building more and more complex structure, until it could observe itself through conscious beings like us.

We’re not separate from the cosmos. We’re how the cosmos knows itself.

That’s not mysticism. That’s where the physics leads when you take information seriously as fundamental.

What You Should Do With This

I know this is a lot to process. And I know some of it sounds almost spiritual, even though we’re talking about expansion rates and atomic clocks.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Don’t just take my word for it.

Look up the Hubble tension. Read about how precise these measurements are, how much the teams have checked their work, how the problem is getting worse as data improves instead of better.
Look up “information in physics” - how physicists like John Wheeler and Carlo Rovelli and others have been arguing for decades that information isn’t just a description but something fundamental.
Look up “participatory universe” and “observer effect in quantum mechanics” - how the very act of observing changes what’s observed, and why that’s not just a measurement quirk but something deep about reality.

And then ask yourself: What makes more sense?

That we need to invent new energy fields, modify Einstein’s equations, and tune a dozen free parameters to make the numbers match?

Or that we need to recognize time isn’t absolute - it emerges from physical processes, and those processes changed as the universe became more structured and information-rich?

I’m not asking you to have faith in my framework. I’m asking you to look at the evidence and think it through.

The measurements are real. The problem is real. The question is: which explanation is simpler, more elegant, and requires fewer assumptions?

To me, the answer is clear.

A Personal Note

I’ve worked on this framework for some time. And the hardest part wasn’t the math or the physics - it was finding a way to explain it that didn’t sound insane.

Because here’s what I kept running into: As soon as you say “consciousness matters” or “information is fundamental” or “time emerges from structure,” people’s eyes glaze over. They think you’ve gone off the deep end into mysticism or philosophy.

But I’m not talking about mysticism. I’m talking about taking the physics seriously and following it wherever it leads.

And it leads here: to a universe that’s not a dead, mechanical clockwork, but an unfolding process where structure builds on structure, information begets more information, and consciousness emerges as the universe’s way of observing itself into ever-greater coherence.

That might sound poetic. But it’s also testable. We can check whether structure formation correlates with apparent expansion rate shifts. We can measure whether information-rich systems affect local time flow differently than information-poor ones. We can predict what the next generation of telescopes should see.

This isn’t faith. It’s science.

But it’s science that doesn’t exile consciousness or meaning from the picture. It puts them back where they belong: at the center, as fundamental parts of how reality works.

Consciousness Information Figure 12: Consciousness as information creator - trillion-fold information increase from thermal plasma to conscious observers.

Figure 13: The complete story in one image - problem, insight, mechanism, evidence, prediction, test.

If that gives you hope - if that makes the universe feel less alien and more like something you’re genuinely part of - I’m glad.

Because you are part of it. Every observation you make, every thought you think, every moment of consciousness you experience is participating in the ongoing process of the universe actualizing itself.

You’re not watching from outside. You’re inside, helping it unfold.

And that, to me, is worth understanding.