A new experiment shows that detecting the ticks of a quantum clock uses far more energy than producing them. This dramatic imbalance reveals that observation itself is what forces time to flow forward. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com A team led by the University of Oxford has uncovered an unexpected contributor to entropy in quantum timekeeping: the act of measurement itself. In findings published on November 14 in Physical Review Letters , the researchers show that the energy required to read a