How Time Unfolds

Have you ever stopped to wonder how time really works—how we move from one moment to the next, living life as a steady stream of “now” after “now”? This has been an unanswered question for centuries. And while scientists still don’t have a final answer, what we’ve learned over the past hundred years has completely changed how we understand it.

Until the early 20th century, scientists believed they had most of the puzzle solved. To them, the world behaved like a perfect machine—predictable, logical, and orderly. That view came from Isaac Newton, a scientist in the 1600s who explained how objects move. His laws said that if you know where something is and how fast it’s going, you can calculate exactly where it will be later. This way of thinking worked brilliantly for everyday things—like falling apples or orbiting planets—and guided science for more than 200 years. [1]

But everything changed when scientists started looking much closer, down to the level of atoms and smaller. That’s when they discovered that Newton’s rules no longer worked. Particles behaved in strange and unpredictable ways. It wasn’t a small problem—it meant the whole system of understanding the universe needed to be rethought.

The first big clue came from Max Planck, a German physicist who’s now known as the father of quantum theory. Around 1900, he was studying how hot objects give off light—why, for example, metal glows red, then white as it heats up. Classical theories couldn’t explain what was happening.

Planck made a bold guess: Maybe energy doesn’t flow continuously like water, but in tiny chunks, which he called “quanta.” It was a strange idea, but it fit the data perfectly, even though Planck himself didn’t yet understand what it really meant. A few years later, Albert Einstein took things further. He showed that light could behave both like a wave—spreading out like ripples on a pond—and like a particle, a kind of energy bullet. These discoveries led to a whole new theory: quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics says that at the smallest scales, particles don’t have one specific position or path. Instead, they exist in a wave of probability—a range of all the places they could be. They only “choose” a location when something interacts with them, like a measurement or an observation. Until then, in some sense, they’re everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Source: Gerd Altmann / Pixabay

This is seen clearly in the famous double-slit experiment. When tiny particles are fired at a wall through two slits, you’d expect two straight lines to appear. But instead, you get a wave-like pattern of many lines, showing interference, just like overlapping water waves. That happens because each particle behaves like a wave of possibilities. But when it’s measured—when we look at it—it lands in just one spot. That moment is called wave function collapse, where the cloud of possibilities becomes one real outcome.

Now here’s where it ties into time. In this quantum framework, each moment doesn’t follow automatically from the last like the ticking of a clock. Instead, every new moment is the most likely result of all the previous ones. Like waves in the ocean, the wave of probability rises, and the peak of that wave is what becomes real. That’s what we experience as time unfolding. Moment by moment, reality takes shape—not because it has to, but because it’s the most probable next step.

And that’s where consciousness might come into the mix.

Max Planck, the same scientist who introduced the idea of quanta, believed that consciousness is not just part of the universe—it’s the foundation of it. “I regard consciousness as fundamental,” he said. “We cannot get behind consciousness.” He also said, “Everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” [3] In simple terms, he believed that nothing we experience as real can exist without someone to experience it.

That idea has fascinated scientists and philosophers for decades. If awareness plays a role in the collapse of the wave of possibilities, then consciousness might help decide what outcome becomes real. In other words, maybe reality unfolds not just according to physical laws, but also influenced by what people collectively think, feel, and expect. Each moment of time could be shaped by both the physics of probability and the presence of conscious minds. If large groups of people focus their attention on the same event or possibility, that shared awareness might gently tip the scales, nudging the wave of potential toward one outcome over another.

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This doesn’t mean we control reality by thought alone. But it suggests we may be more involved than we realize. As scientists continue exploring these questions, especially as we reach the 100th anniversary of quantum theory in 2025, we’re reminded that the universe is still full of mystery.

Time, it turns out, isn’t just a string of automatic steps. It’s a living process—each moment rising as the most likely crest of a wave of possibility. And consciousness, perhaps, rides along with it, helping to shape what comes next.