𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐀𝐒 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄

November 13, 2026

Physics describes change as occurring in time.

But what if time does not precede change?

What if time is what state transitions look like from inside a changing system?

The question is older than computation.

Leibniz rejected the idea that space and time existed independently of the things and events ordered through them. Space was an order of coexistence. Time was an order of succession.

This was already a profound reversal.

Events do not occur because they have been placed inside a pre-existing container called time.

Temporal order emerges from the relation between successive events.

Newton took the opposite view.

For Newton, time flowed uniformly and independently of what happened within it. Physical change occurred against an absolute temporal background.

The structure was simple:

time first,

change second.

Einstein destroyed that picture.

There is no universal clock and no observer-independent simultaneity extending across the universe. Observers in relative motion can disagree about which distant events occur at the same time. Space and time no longer form independent universal backgrounds.

Absolute time disappears.

Spacetime remains.

The revolution is enormous, but the framework is still geometric.

Time is no longer universal, but change is still described through a spacetime framework.

Computation radicalizes Leibniz’s reversal.

A computational system does not need to begin with time as a container in which change occurs.

It begins with states and rules of transition.

One state gives rise to another.

Succession becomes state transition.

The usual picture is that time permits change.

The computational picture reverses the relation: transition generates temporal order.

Bach distinguishes two notions of time.

One is the intuitive notion that we have as human beings: Newtonian time. This describes the transition of the universe from the past into the future via the present.

The other is more fundamental: state transitions, which allow the universe to preserve memory and remain intelligible.

A universe composed merely of disconnected states would have no dynamics, no discoverable law, no organisms, no memory, no causality.

There must be some relation by which one state becomes another and information passes between them.

Transition therefore does more than produce succession.

It preserves enough structure across change for a causal history to exist.

On this view, transition does not happen in time.

Time is what transition looks like from inside the system.

Bach illustrates this with a thought experiment.

Imagine the universe not as a block of spacetime but as something closer to a traveling wave.

An observer is not outside that wave looking at its history.

The observer is a pattern carried by it.

A vortex on the crest.

The observer cannot leave the present because the observer is itself part of the process through which the present is produced.

Its clocks, memories and perceptions are internal updates of that pattern.

The rate of those updates depends on its relation to the surrounding dynamics.

What the observer experiences as relativistic time is therefore, in Bach’s model, not a fundamental dimension of reality.

It is the local measure of an underlying process of transition.

The same move puts pressure on continuity.

Relativity presents spacetime as a continuum, but at singularities the spacetime description breaks down.

For Bach, continuity cannot be fundamental if it cannot be realized. It is an observer-level appearance produced by the underlying dynamics.

A computer game can generate a world that looks spatially continuous even though the underlying process consists of discrete updates.

Continuity belongs to the representation rather than to the ontology.

From the perspective of the observer, spacetime is the set of locations that can contain information and the trajectories that information can take.

The underlying structure can instead be described in terms of states, causal relations, transitions and information flows.

Spacetime becomes a derived geometry of those relations.

Suppose the universe is represented as a state vector or informational structure.

Information is not static.

It propagates through relations between locations.

Those relations form a causal structure.

Locality, distance, speed and perhaps even the apparent geometry of space could emerge from the architecture through which information is allowed to move.

In such a model, the speed of light could express a limit on the propagation of information through the causal structure.

From geometry to dynamics.

Not: what objects exist in spacetime?

But: what transformations are possible from one state to another?

Bach’s claim is not that computation tells us what physics ultimately is, but that the physics we can describe without the language breaking has to play out computationally.

This leads to a different conception of physical law.

Physical law is not a thing in addition to dynamics; physical law is the stable form of dynamics.

It is the invariant organization of possible transitions:

the structure that determines how one state can become another.

Under this definition, the concept of software follows directly.

A program is an organization of possible transitions that can remain invariant across different realizations.

If the relevant functional organization is realized, the corresponding transitions can occur.

It requires realization, not material identity.

The ontological consequence is that what persists is the organization of transition.

And if transitions themselves generate the spacetime structure available to embedded observers,

computation is no longer something occurring inside an already existing physical world.

If relativistic time and continuous spacetime are not fundamental, and physical regularity can be understood as lawful transition, computation occupies a different ontological position.

It becomes a candidate for the generative order from which space, time and physical regularity emerge.

Leibniz defined time through succession.

Computation makes succession formally explicit as state transition.

𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞.

𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞.

𝐑𝐄𝐅𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐒
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Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Monadology. 1714.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Third Paper to Samuel Clarke. 1716.

Einstein, Albert. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” 1905.

Bach, Joscha. Remarks on state transition, spacetime, continuity, and computation. Conversation on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, 7 February 2022.

© 2026 Leire Ruiz Nunez