Quantum physics is not really my lane, but it’s a subject of interest of mine. Snapdragon chips, AI, business strategy ore even data center buildouts are more my sweet candies. But there is a line of theoretical work I can’t stop thinking about that sits directly at the intersection of the physics I don’t fully understand and the infrastructure investments I track for a living. The claim: time itself might not be fundamental. It might emerge from quantum entanglement as a side effect of quantum systems interacting under specific conditions. I’m going to try to explain why that matters for the compute layer being built right now in the Chicago corridor.
At the Perimeter Institute, researchers are modeling scenarios where spacetime curvature yields temporal dimensions as emergent properties of entangled quantum systems. Stripped of the math, the argument is that time doesn’t exist independently, it shows up when quantum information complexity exceeds a certain threshold. Work in the Journal of High Energy Physics introduced “temporal entanglement entropy,” showing that tracing over Euclidean time maps to coarse-graining a system. I cannot evaluate the math. What I can evaluate is what it requires to test the idea experimentally.
Testing time emergence requires quantum systems that can hold their states long enough to observe subtle temporal signatures. That’s a coherence problem. Caltech’s August 2025 breakthrough extended quantum memory coherence times by up to thirtyfold by translating electrical signals into sound waves, which buys researchers dramatically more experimental time to look for evidence that time is doing something fundamental inside the system. Every additional second of coherence is a second where the physics might actually show up.
This is where the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park connects. The $20 billion bet being built in Chicago’s backyard was designed explicitly to support both near-term commercial quantum computing and the kind of fundamental research that probes questions nobody yet knows how to ask. The Aurora exascale supercomputer at Argonne is already running quantum simulations using tensor network models that probe what happens when entanglement reaches critical thresholds. Researchers are also using quantum entanglement to synchronize clocks across distances with precision that far exceeds classical methods, which gives them the measurement tools needed to detect temporal anomalies if they exist.
The practical question isn’t whether time emerges from entanglement. That’s for the physicists. The practical question is whether the infrastructure being built now, the quantum parks, the exascale clusters, is designed with enough flexibility to run this kind of research alongside the commercial workloads that justify the capital. In the Chicago corridor at least, the answer appears to be yes. Argonne and Fermilab are already running quantum gravity simulations on existing infrastructure. The Illinois Quantum Park design supports both commercial quantum computing and fundamental physics. That dual-use flexibility is what makes the investment defensible even if the more exotic physics doesn’t pan out on any particular timeline.
I find this one well worth following even though it’s outside my usual beat. If time really does emerge from entanglement, the implications for what it means to run a computation are not small. Most likely the physics is more complicated than the early papers suggest, as it almost always is. But the infrastructure being built to find out is also the infrastructure that runs drug discovery simulations and materials modeling and cryptography workloads. The exotic research is the bonus track on a record that’s commercially viable either way.