Is Time a Fundamental Substance? Exploring Black Holes and Causal Theories

We have lived in this world for ages without truly seeing it, questioning whether self‑awareness is real, yet as the only information‑aggregating entity capable of deep thought we sometimes speak nonsense.

Time is not only a standard unit of measurement but also an imprint within us; each cell has its own life cycle and each organ its own biological clock. Whether this familiar feeling is the essence of time— a fundamental substance or a macroscopic statistical effect of deeper mechanisms—remains unresolved.

Assuming the universe began at a singularity defined by the Big Bang, we can use Planck time (the smallest possible unit derived from known physical laws) as a universal temporal axis. To test if time is a fundamental substance, we introduce the most exotic celestial object—black holes—into this model.

In the 18th century, English clergyman and natural philosopher John Michell proposed, based on Newtonian gravity, that an object massive enough could trap its own emitted light. After Einstein’s general relativity, Karl Schwarzschild defined the Schwarzschild radius, the critical radius at which any mass becomes a singularity with infinite density and gravity. The singularity is the core of a black hole, surrounded by the event horizon, beyond which known physical laws cease to apply.

Because gravity and spacetime curvature become infinite inside a black hole, general relativity predicts that time effectively stops there. If time were a fundamental universal scale, it could be used to partition the universe, and the partitioned “set” should map bijectively to the original whole. However, black holes exist only on the temporal slice of their creation; on later slices they become empty voids. Re‑assembling all slices would cause the black holes to disappear, yet we continue to observe them, revealing a paradox.

A different perspective draws on the Indian concept of “karma” and Buddhist causality. If every moment in the universe originates from preceding quantum states and their interactions, the early nodes determine later ones, suggesting a deterministic evolution from the moment of the Big Bang.

Canadian physicist Rafael Sorkin developed a causal‑set theory that treats spacetime as a network of point‑like events linked by causal relations, growing like a tree. This reverses the traditional view that spacetime is an objective substance; instead, spacetime may emerge as a statistical phenomenon from underlying information, analogous to temperature arising from molecular motion.

To be continued.