If objects in our world exist constantly by themselves alone, their time passes absolutely, at a fixed rate, but if they are virtual, their time passes as pixels are generated. If we pause a game world, its time stops until we restart it. Time in a virtual world passes as its events occur, just as atomic clocks measure our time by atomic events.
Conway’s Game of Life is an online application that produces pixel patterns (Figure 2.10) that arise, repeat, and vanish to simulate how living entities arise, grow, and die in our world. If we pause it, its time stops, and if we restart it, its time carries on. The lifetime of a pixel pattern is then the number of events that it exists for.
So, if a pixel pattern repeats for twenty minutes of our time, is that its lifetime? It might seem so, but if the application is run on a faster computer, that pattern might only repeat for a few seconds. To us, its lifetime is shorter but its virtual life, of computer events, is the same. It follows that the lifetime of a virtual entity doesn’t change when a faster computer runs it because the events it completes are the same. The same pattern run by two computers, one fast and one slow, has the same virtual life though we see different times.
Now consider Einstein’s twin example, where one twin travels in a very fast rocket and returns a year later to find his brother is an old man of eighty. Neither twin was aware that their time ran differently, but one twin’s life is nearly over, while the other’s is still beginning. Yet the eighty-year-old twin wasn’t cheated, as he still got eighty years of heart beats, and grandchildren to boot. The twins only realized that their time had passed differently when they met again to find that they had aged differently. Relativity then predicts that our lifetimes can change just as they do in Conway’s Game of Life! Time changes in our world as it does in a virtual reality.
When people first hear that our time can change, they think it is a trick, that only perceived time changes, but it isn’t so, because it is time as measured by clocks that changes. The evidence agrees, as accelerating short-lived particles can double their lifetimes. Yet acceleration shouldn’t change how time passes in an objective world.
Why then does a rocket’s acceleration slow down time? Gamers know that the screen lags in a big battle because events take longer when the computer has more to do, though the event sequence stays the same. This suggests that acceleration increases the quantum network workload to slow down time, although we don’t notice the lag because our bodies exist on the screen of space.
If the physical world is virtual, matter exists by the quantum network not by itself, so if that network is finite, increasing movement must reduce the generation of matter. There is a trade-off between how often matter exists and how often it accelerates. The quantum network has to reduce an object’s life events to increase its movement events, so its time slows down. Just as a movie slows down when the network running it does, our time slows down when the ticks of matter existence do. In Einstein’s example, the quantum network that accelerated the rocket twin ran his life slower, so he only aged a year, but the twin on earth had no such load, so eighty years of his life passed in the usual way. Time then slows down because matter accelerating exists for fewer events.