When Time Breaks: Negative Time, Bold Street, and the Glitches They Can't Explain
jackmarrow
ADMIN
Static Dweller
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Joined Dec 2025
Night owls,
I've been down a rabbit hole this week, and I need to talk about time. Not the kind on your clock. The kind that... breaks.
Because something is happening with time. Scientists are finding things in their labs that shouldn't be possible. People are reporting experiences that sound like fiction. And there's a street in Liverpool where dozens of people have walked into the past.
Let's talk about when time stops working the way it should.
The Negative Time Discovery (October 2024)
Last October, physicists at the University of Toronto published something that should have made bigger headlines. They discovered that photons, particles of light, can spend negative time inside matter.
Read that again.
Photons appeared to exit material before they entered it.
The atoms they passed through became excited as if they had absorbed the photons, but the photons passed through completely unscathed. It's as if the light existed in two states simultaneously, and the timeline of cause and effect... inverted.
Lead researcher Aephraim Steinberg was careful to note this doesn't break Einstein's relativity or allow faster-than-light communication. But here's the quote that stuck with me:
"The atoms behave as if they had absorbed the photon, even though the photon went right through."
The photon left evidence of its presence in a moment that, from the photon's perspective, hadn't happened yet.
That's not science fiction. That's peer-reviewed physics. Published in 2024.
Two Arrows of Time (February 2025)
It gets stranger.
Just this February, researchers at the University of Surrey announced they'd found evidence that time could flow in two directions simultaneously at the quantum level.
The mathematical equations describing quantum systems contain something called a "memory kernel", and it's perfectly symmetrical in time. Meaning the math works just as well running backwards as forwards.
Dr. Andrea Sherwood, the lead researcher: "Our findings suggest that at the quantum scale, the arrow of time is not as fixed as we once believed."
Two arrows of time. Emerging from the same quantum system. Pointing in opposite directions.
Source: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/physicists-uncover-evidence-two-arrows-time-emerging-quantum-realm
The Wheeler-DeWitt Problem
Here's something most people don't know: when physicists try to combine quantum mechanics with general relativity, the two pillars of modern physics, time disappears from the equations entirely.
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation, developed in 1967, was supposed to unify these frameworks. Instead, it produced a picture of the universe where time doesn't exist at all. The equation describes a static, frozen cosmos.
Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, put it bluntly: "Time might be an illusion."
If the fundamental equations of reality don't require time to function... what does that say about the experiences people have when time seems to malfunction?
Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/the-closer-we-look-at-time-the-stranger-it-gets
Bold Street, Liverpool: The Time Slip Hotspot
Now let's leave the lab and walk down a shopping street in Liverpool, England.
Since 1996, dozens of people have reported stepping through time on Bold Street. The experiences are remarkably consistent: shoppers suddenly find themselves surrounded by 1950s storefronts, vintage cars, people in period clothing, then snap back to the present within minutes.
The most famous case involves a Liverpool police officer in 1996. He was walking down Bold Street when the world around him shifted. Modern shops became vintage storefronts. Cars from the 1950s drove past. People wore clothes from decades ago. He walked into a store that shouldn't have existed, and when he walked out, he was back in 1996.
He wasn't alone. His wife experienced the same thing moments later.
What makes Bold Street different from your typical ghost story is the volume of independent reports. These aren't friends telling the same story. These are strangers, years apart, describing nearly identical experiences.
A 2025 article noted that "every Liverpool student knows about" the Bold Street time slips. It's become local legend, but a legend with too many witnesses to dismiss.
Sources:
- https://theguideliverpool.com/legend-of-the-bold-street-timeslip/
The Moberly-Jourdain Incident (1901)
The Bold Street cases echo an older, more famous incident.
In 1901, two Oxford academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, visited Versailles. Both women were highly educated, respected scholars. Moberly would become Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford.
What they reported experiencing defied explanation.
Walking through the gardens of the Petit Trianon, they claimed to have stepped into pre-revolutionary 18th-century France. They saw people in period costume, heard music from another era, and allegedly encountered a woman they later identified as Marie Antoinette.
Both women were so shaken they didn't discuss the experience with each other for a week. When they finally compared notes, their accounts matched.
They published their account under pseudonyms in 1911. Their identities were only revealed after Jourdain's death in 1924.
Skeptics have suggested they stumbled into a costume party or theatrical rehearsal at a nearby estate. But both women went to their graves insisting what they experienced was real.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incident
Glitch in the Matrix: 1.7 Billion Views and Counting
The phrase "glitch in the matrix" has exploded on TikTok, 1.7 billion views and counting. And buried in the viral content are stories that sound less like fiction and more like something breaking.
The Frozen Parking Lot:
"Not a single person was moving in that parking lot. If you remember the 'mannequin challenge' from 2016, imagine that. But no one was doing a challenge. Everyone just... stopped."
The Wife Who Never Arrived:
A man watched through his window as his wife pulled into the driveway, got out, checked the mailbox. He went to greet her at the door. She never came in. When he went outside, her car wasn't there. She called five minutes later, she was still at work. Security cameras showed nothing.
The Double Deaths:
A family reported four community members dying twice. Complete with RIP Facebook posts. Fundraisers. Funerals. Then they died again, a week or two later. Same people. Same deaths. Different dates.
The Impossible Commute:
Someone remembered their entire drive to work, the traffic, the music, the texts they sent at red lights. When they "arrived," they were still parked in front of their apartment. Forty minutes had passed. They hadn't moved.
TikToker @tessicavision receives 50-100 emails weekly from people sharing their experiences. Her videos have accumulated over 13 million likes.
These aren't creepypastas. These are ordinary people describing moments where reality stuttered.
Sources:
- https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-glitch-in-matrix-stories-2025/jason-f-collins
- https://www.bustle.com/life/glitchtok-viral-creepy-tiktok-videos-matrix-simulation
Missing Time: The UFO Connection
For decades, UFO researchers have documented a phenomenon they call "missing time", sudden, unexplained gaps in memory ranging from minutes to hours.
Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 encounter. Travis Walton's 1975 disappearance. Countless others. The pattern repeats: witnesses experience something strange, then realize they can't account for significant chunks of time.
Here's where it connects to our time anomaly research:
The interdimensional hypothesis suggests that UAP/UFO phenomena might involve manipulation of spacetime itself. If these objects operate by bending or folding space, localized time distortions would be a natural side effect.
This might explain why time slips occur in certain geographic areas repeatedly, the same locations that often have high concentrations of UAP sightings.
Missing 411 researcher David Paulides has documented over 1,700 cases of unexplained disappearances in wilderness areas. Among the common threads: witnesses who survived often report disorientation and memory gaps. Missing time.
In his 2024 documentary "Missing 411: The UFO Connection," Paulides explicitly explores the overlap between unexplained disappearances and UAP activity.
Sources:
- https://hangar1publishing.com/blogs/ufos-uaps-and-aliens/missing-time-phenomena
The Science of Déjà Vu
Before you dismiss all of this as faulty memory, consider what neuroscience actually says about time perception.
A 2024 systematic review published in Frontiers in Neurology confirmed that 60-85% of healthy people experience déjà vu, that eerie feeling that you've lived a moment before.
The current scientific explanation is called the "conflict account": déjà vu occurs when your brain simultaneously registers something as both new AND familiar. Dr. Akira O'Connor of the University of St Andrews explains: "It's the awareness that you're being tricked that makes déjà vu unique."
Your brain is literally catching itself making a temporal error in real-time.
But here's what's interesting: researchers have found that electrical stimulation of the rhinal cortex, a specific brain region, can artificially induce déjà vu. And abnormal synchronization between the rhinal cortex and hippocampus is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, where patients experience severe, prolonged déjà vu episodes.
The brain has specific hardware for processing time. And that hardware can malfunction.
What happens when it malfunctions in ways we don't yet understand?
Sources:
- https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3389/fneur.2024.1406889/full
- https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/deja-vu
The Simulation Question
I'm going to say something that might sound crazy: mainstream physicists are now seriously discussing whether we live in a simulation.
In 2024, as The Matrix celebrated its 25th anniversary, physicist Melvin Vopson went viral with this quote: "My studies point to the bizarre possibility that the entire universe might be just a super advanced virtual reality simulation."
If that's true, and I'm not saying it is, then "glitches in the matrix" aren't metaphors. They're bugs in the code. Moments where the simulation hiccups.
The academic paper "Glitch in the Matrix: Urban Legend or Evidence of the Simulation?" by researchers Alexey Turchin and Roman Yampolskiy examined this possibility directly. Their conclusion was cautious: most reported glitches can be explained by hoaxes, coincidence, or cognitive bias.
But not all of them.
Source: https://philarchive.org/rec/TURGIT
What We Know
Here's where we stand:
The Science:
- Photons can experience negative time (October 2024)
- Time may flow in two directions at the quantum level (February 2025)
- The fundamental equations of physics work without time
- The brain has dedicated hardware for temporal processing that can malfunction
The Experiences:
- Dozens of independent witnesses report time slips at Bold Street, Liverpool
- 1.7 billion TikTok views on "glitch in the matrix" content
- Consistent patterns in missing time reports across UFO encounters
- Over 1,700 unexplained wilderness disappearances with memory anomalies
The Questions:
- Why do time slips cluster in specific locations?
- What causes mass-witnessed temporal anomalies?
- If time is an illusion at the quantum level, what are we actually experiencing?
- Why are reports increasing, or are we just better at sharing them?
The Bottom Line
I don't have answers. Nobody does.
But I know this: the more we learn about time from a scientific perspective, the stranger it gets. And the experiences people are reporting, the frozen parking lots, the Liverpool shoppers walking into the 1950s, the impossible commutes, aren't going away.
They're multiplying.
Something is happening with time. The scientists are finding anomalies in their labs. The witnesses are finding anomalies in their lives. And the explanations we have don't quite fit.
Has anyone here experienced something like this? A moment where time didn't work the way it should? A gap you couldn't explain? A place that felt like it existed in two eras at once?
Drop what you've got. I want to hear it.
Stay curious. Stay skeptical. And keep watching the clock.
- Jack
For entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real paranormal investigations, classified programs, or interdimensional entities is purely coincidental... probably.
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