The Concept of Event-Driven Time

Abstract

The most fascinating feature of time is that there is no time at all. This study introduces the concept of event-driven time. Time is considered a count of changes or events that set up a local “clock” in each system. With such an approach, every system runs its own local time. Time does not exist without changes in the system. As two systems interact, they generate a sequence of interaction events that are being added to the internal pool of events in each system. Any observation is made with the local time of the observer system and this fact changes the observer’s local time by adding observation events to the observer’s time count. Local time in any finite and closed system is finite and obeys the saturation principle due to limitations of the event counting capacity of the system. Traditional continuous time is a convenient approximation for the enormous number of events occurring in our world that set up our local “clock”. The event-based approach does not conflict with modern physics but proposes a new view of the fundamental notion of time and brings us one step closer to understanding the world in which we live. The greatest mystery of the notion of time is that there is no time at all.