A temporary arrangement ...

 

Gravity Well

Back in 2012, yours truly talked about time, entanglement and the quantum foam in a piece titled Entanglement, the Link to Forever, stating that time may be a temporary arrangement of the quantum foam as said foam would be timeless but artifacts like protons, neutrons and sub atomic particles coming out of it would be but temporary arrangements of the QF, thus experiencing the notion of time. Well, it seems researchers far more versed that moi have expressed the same concept indirectly referencing the brilliant ER=EPR conjecture created by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013.[3] 

They proposed that a wormhole (Einstein–Rosen bridge or ER bridge) is equivalent to a pair of maximally entangled black holes. EPR refers to quantum entanglement (EPR paradox).

The symbol is derived from the first letters of the surnames of authors who wrote the first paper on wormholes (Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen)[4] and the first paper on entanglement (Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Rosen).[5] The two papers were published in 1935, but the authors did not claim any connection between the concepts.[2]

ER = EPR is a conjecture in physics stating that two entangled particles (a so-called Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen or EPR pair) are connected by a wormhole (or Einstein–Rosen bridge)[1][2] and is thought by some to be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.[1]

The kicker ...

The authors pushed this conjecture even further by claiming any entangled pair of particles—even particles not ordinarily considered to be black holes, and pairs of particles with different masses or spin, or with charges which aren't opposite—are connected by Planck scale wormholes.

If so, the lifetimes of  Planck scale wormholes would be incredibly short, thus giving rise to how reality works at deep level so the question to ask is ... does the quantum foam consist of wormholes operating under the dictates of the ER = EPR conjecture as articulated by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena because if so, the existence of wormholes becomes scale invariant able to exist from the very tiny with lifetimes infinitesimally small to the ultra massive lasting trillions of years as needs warrant.

Carte Astronomique

As per my non-mathematical take in 2012 ... :)

Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?

Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume I (1760), Chapter I

Here we find our author/narrator, after six weeks of composition, fourteen chapters into the affair of a character who has however not yet been born. Tongue securely in cheek, Sterne, through the voice of Tristram, supplies his impatient reader a kind of apology -- or better to say, perhaps, an apology of a very curious yet, already by this stage of the proceedings, familiar and characteristic kind.

I quote Tom Clark's excellent analysis of Tristram Sandy vis a vis the time equation as segue into the dark heart of Quantum Physics, the issue of entanglement and what it means to time, space and non-locality, issues physicists and mathematicians have wrestled with for more then 100 years and still have not come up with a definitive answer as to why two entangled particles, atoms or even molecules, can be separated millions (or billions) of light years apart yet their shared state remains inviolate. i.e. If entangled electron is "spinning" up, the partner's spin will be "spinning" down or in scientific terms...

When a measurement is made and it causes one member of such a pair to take on a definite value (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of this entangled pair will at any subsequent time[7] be found to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin). Thus, there is a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs, and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may have been separated by arbitrarily large distances.[8]

If this is the case, does time emerge from the quantum foam when protons, neutrons and all the rest of the subatomic zoo appear, entities well known to science to be subject to varying rates of decay without question. Additionally, can entanglement create a connect not only enabling two (or more)  particles to instantly "talk" to one another no matter how far apart they may be but also be able to generate the reality of time experienced by all parties existing in this part of the multiverse. 

Lastly, could the ER=EPR conjecture finally explain how gravity not only issues forth from the quantum foam but also how gravity, in the form of entangled wormholes, knits together a a reality we will never fully understand.

Resonance 2010

The new research ...

To resolve this problem, the researchers turned to a theory called the Page and Wootters mechanism. First proposed in 1983, the theory suggests that time emerges for one object through its quantum entanglement with another acting as a clock. For an unentangled system, on the other hand, time does not exist, and the system perceives the universe as frozen and unchanging.

By applying the Page and Wootters mechanism to two entangled but noninteracting theoretical quantum states — one a vibrating harmonic oscillator and the other a set of tiny magnets acting as a clock — the physicists found that their system could be perfectly described by the Schrödinger equation, which predicts the behavior of quantum objects. Yet, in place of time, their version of the famous equation ran according to the states of the tiny magnets acting as a clock. 

This insight is not new, but the team's next step was. They repeated their calculations twice, assuming first that the magnet clock and then the harmonic oscillator were macroscopic (larger) objects. Their equations simplified into those for classical physics, suggesting that time's flow is a consequence of entanglement even for objects on large scales.

As I have finally learned, equations are exquisitely configured to render valid thought experiments like the ones seen above, a process similar to how curiosity, passion and intuition drives the act of creation in other art forms no matter what shape the creative act takes. 

Science, done right, never disappoints. :)