The Science and Philosophy of Creative Time 

There is almost nothing that we perceive as ubiquitously as the passage of time. And yet, our most successful physical theories still struggle to fully make sense of this concept.

Inspired by this puzzle, quantum physicists Flavio Del Santo and Nicolas Gisin proposed that two fundamentally different kinds of time play a role in nature. The first is geometric time: the standard time of predictable evolution, namely, the time measured by ordinary clocks and watches.

The second is creative time, a form of time that “ticks” only when something not predetermined becomes actual; that is, when genuinely new information comes into existence in the world.

No clock has ever measured creative time, until now, as we have brought it into existence.

The full paper that inspired the creative time clock is "Creative and geometric times in physics, mathematics, logic, and philosophy", by quantum physicists Flavio Del Santo and Nicolas Gisin.  

There, the two concepts of geometric and creative times are discussed in different contexts. The former is the time of deterministic physics and merely parametrizes a given dynamical evolution. The latter is instead characterized by real change, that is, when novel information that gets created as a non-necessary event becomes determinate. This happens in a fundamentally indeterministic physics, like when a quantum random number generator produces a bit.

This allows one to give a naturalistic characterization of the present as the moment that separates the potential future from the determinate past. The dicothomy of creative time goes beyong physics, finding natural applications in classical and intuitionistic mathematics, respectively, and in classical and intuitionistic logic, as well as how they relate to the well-known A- and B-theories in the philosophy of time. 

In a society accelerated by constant urgency and stressful relentless deadlines, we propose a different rhythm. Not a more precise one, but a more meaningful one.

Creative time is also an invitation to step outside the tyranny of schedules and productivity metrics, and to reconnect with time as a space for emergence, reflection, and genuine novelty.
By adopting creative time one can gently reshape the tempo of modern life, allowing moments to proceed with openness rather than pressure.

The Creative Time Clock is a quiet instrument for this shift: a device that invites life to slow down, not by resisting the world’s speed, but by introducing a new way of inhabiting time itself.