The Clockwork Illusion

Why Time Isn’t Flowing—It’s Resolving

Most people experience time as something that flows—something that moves forward and carries them with it. But in this concise and unsettling essay, Laura Tidwell reveals why that experience is an illusion. Time, she argues, is not a river or a force. It’s simply the local rate at which causality resolves. There is no motion through time—only the structured unfolding of physical interactions governed by gravity, entropy, and spacetime geometry.

Drawing from general relativity, thermodynamics, and perceptual neuroscience, The Clockwork Illusion reframes time as a structural feature of the universe rather than a dynamic one. What we call “the present” is just the brain’s registration of local causal resolution. Past, present, and future all exist—already structured—and what feels like change is merely the sequence playing out.

This essay challenges not just how we understand time, but how we understand ourselves. If time doesn’t flow, then nothing is really changing. It’s only resolving.