Why This Is Not a Scientific Paper (and Why That Matters)
Most of the work in the VERSF program is technical by necessity. It deals with entropy bounds, irreversibility, distinguishability, and the formal structures required for facts, clocks, and dynamics to exist at all. Those papers use mathematics because they have to. Precision matters. Claims are constrained. Language is carefully narrowed.
A World Without Years is not that.
This piece is deliberately non-technical. It introduces no equations, proposes no formal model, and makes no claims that could be tested in a laboratory. It is not intended for peer review, and it does not compete with the scientific papers that underpin VERSF. Instead, it serves a different purpose altogether.
It is an attempt to help people feel what emergent time means.
The Problem with Explaining Emergent Time
One of the persistent difficulties in discussing emergent time is that almost everyone begins with an assumption they don’t realise they’re making: that time exists independently of the world. That it flows whether anything happens or not. That clocks measure something “out there.”
From that starting point, emergent time sounds either mystical or evasive.
But the core VERSF claim is much simpler—and much more uncomfortable:
Time is not a background against which change occurs.
Time is what we call the accumulation of irreversible change itself.
That idea is easy to state and remarkably hard to internalise, because nearly every human environment reinforces the opposite intuition. Earth has stable cycles. Days repeat. Seasons return. Damage is often repaired. The world forgets easily. Under those conditions, clocks feel fundamental.
So rather than argue against that intuition directly, this piece removes the environmental scaffolding that supports it.
Why This Story Takes Place on Another World
The civilisation described in A World Without Years does not lack intelligence, culture, or foresight. What it lacks is repeatability.
There are no stable days.
No clean years.
No reliable long cycles that return the world to the same state.
In such an environment, counting becomes less useful than observing completion. Intervals matter less than processes finishing. Memory lives in scars, coastlines, and changes that never fully heal.
This is not science fiction as prediction. It is science fiction as constraint removal. By imagining a world where periodicity fails, the story exposes how much of our concept of time depends on environmental repetition rather than necessity.
What This Has to Do with VERSF
Within the VERSF framework, time emerges when changes accumulate that cannot be undone locally. It is inseparable from entropy, irreversibility, and physical memory. Clocks do not reveal time; they approximate it under favourable conditions.
The story mirrors this idea without naming it.
“Turnings” end when thermal processes finish, not when a number is reached. History is recorded in damage, not dates. Planning is based on conditions, not durations. Even the visiting crew gradually lose the assumption that time must be carried independently of the world.
Nothing in the story contradicts physics.
Nothing in it replaces theory.
It simply presents a different intuition first.
Why Use Narrative at All?
Because intuition precedes acceptance.
Most conceptual shifts in physics—relativity, quantum mechanics, entropy—were resisted not because the mathematics was wrong, but because the underlying intuitions were. Narrative allows those intuitions to be re-trained gently, without confrontation.
This piece does not argue that clocks are useless, or that calendars are illusions. On Earth, they work extremely well. It suggests only that they work because the environment permits them to—and that this permission is contingent, not fundamental.
How to Read This Piece
If you are looking for equations, this isn’t the right place.
If you are looking for a model to test, it isn’t here.
If you are looking for a different way to think about time before encountering the formal work, it might help.
A World Without Years is not an alternative to the scientific papers.
It is a doorway.
It asks a single question, indirectly:
What would time look like if the world itself refused to forget?
Everything else follows.