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Assembly Theory of Time

FILE: <Assembly Theory.htm> GENERAL INDEX [Navigate to MAIN MENU ] ASSEMBLY THEORY OF TIME Abstract TIME IS AN OBJECT: Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can be measured in the laboratory. Time is unidirectional forward.

If the lineages are followed back beyond the origin of life on Earth to the origin of the universe, it would be logical to assume that the memory of the universe was lower in the past, which means that the universe's ability to generate objects of high Assembly is limited by its size in time.Some objects are too large in time to come into existence in intervals that are smaller than their assembly index.For complex objects such as computers to exist in our universe, many other objects had to form first, such as stars, heavy elements, life, tools, technology and the abstraction of computing.All this takes time and is path-dependent due to the casual contingency of each innovation that is made.The early universe may not have been capable of computation, as we know it, because not enough history had existed.Time had to pass and be materially formed through the selection of the computer's constituent objects.This is also true for large language models, new pharmaceutical drugs, the techno sphere or any other complex object. "The concept of emergence captures how new structures seem to appear at higher levels of spatial organization that could not be predicted from lower levels.Examples include the wetness of water, which is not predicted from individual water molecules, or the way that living cells is made from individual nonliving atoms.However, the objects traditional physics considers emergent become fundamental in assembly theory.From this perspective an object's "emergentness" (how far it departs from a physicist's expectations of elementary building blocks) depends on how deep it lies in time.This idea points toward the origins of life, but we can also travel in the other direction. Doran, D. E., E. Clarke, G. Keenan, E. Carrick, C. Mathis & L. Cronin.2021.Exploring the sequence space of unknown oligomers and polymers.Cell Reports Physical Science 2:100685.

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