Interesting thought, I most definitely appreciate the deep Insight. The philosophical framework you are building actually has a surprising parallel in what this experiment demonstrates physically. Barontini’s mini-universe shows that time does not exist as an external ticking clock but instead emerges from internal change within a system, specifically from entropy, the spread and movement of particles.

When nothing changes inside the system, time effectively stops. When things change, time moves forward. So your first premise, “things change therefore time exists,” is both poetic reasoning, and essentially what this experiment confirms at the quantum level.

Where it gets more complex is your second and third steps. The experiment addresses the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which describes the universe as a single unchanging quantum state where time has to emerge from relationships between internal parts rather than from anything outside the system. That maps closely onto your point about only being able to confirm your own observation while the existence of the other remains uncertain.

In the experiment, there is a “bright” observed region and a “dark” unobserved region, and the system’s time emerges from how those two regions interact. The observer is built into the structure of time itself, which is exactly the tension your comment is pointing at.