Can the creator of the universe pause it like a movie, and we'd never know?
If time is relational — just about the change of states — then a universal pause would be undetectable from inside. Nothing in physics rules it out. Nothing in physics can detect it.
David: If time is really just about relative change of things, then in theory couldn't a theoretical creator of our universe pause it and unpause it like a movie, and we'd have no way to know? Because our conscious experience of the world is necessarily due to the change of states (movement of electrons and atoms) of matter. So if that isn't changing, then we cannot perceive anything. The creator could pause the universe for a billion years and to us we wouldn't be able to tell — it would just be like the day went on as normal, and we wouldn't feel any pause at all. Or is there something maybe quantum that disproves this idea, perhaps because it exists outside of this version of time?
Claude: Your reasoning is sound, and this is actually a well-formed argument that aligns with relational theories of time going back to Leibniz and more recently Julian Barbour's timeless physics.
The core logic holds: if time is fundamentally about state changes rather than some absolute background substance, then a universal pause is in principle undetectable from within the system. Consciousness, memory formation, perception — all require physical processes (neural firing, molecular interactions, electron state changes). Freeze those, and there's no experiential "gap" because experience itself requires the very changes that have been frozen.
On quantum mechanics as an escape hatch: Unfortunately, it doesn't help you here. All quantum processes are still embedded within time. The Schrödinger equation is explicitly time-dependent. Wave function evolution, quantum tunneling, radioactive decay, vacuum fluctuations, decoherence — all are described by time-evolution operators. Pause time, and you pause quantum mechanics too. Entanglement is often misunderstood as somehow "outside" spacetime, but entangled correlations don't transmit information and are still spatiotemporally embedded. There's nothing in standard QM that operates in some meta-temporal dimension that could serve as a witness to the pause.
The deeper issue: For the pause to "last a billion years," we need to ask — according to what clock? This requires positing a meta-time external to our spacetime in which the pause has duration. The creator would need to exist in this meta-temporal framework. This isn't incoherent, but it does mean you're postulating a richer temporal structure than our physics currently describes.
The philosophical rub: This scenario is unfalsifiable by construction — which is actually your point. Some would say this makes it meaningless (verificationist line), but I'd push back on that. The unfalsifiability reveals something important about the relational nature of time and experience. It's less that the claim is empty and more that it exposes how our access to reality is necessarily mediated through change. You're not asking a question that physics can answer. You're mapping the exact shape of what physics can't reach.