Time's Arrow Points Nowhere: Why Page-Wootters and Quantum Clocks Confirm What Experiential Empiricism Already Demonstrated

The January 2026 New Scientist article "The daring idea that time is an illusion and how we could prove it" discusses renewed interest in the Page-Wootters mechanism, which proposes that time emerges from quantum entanglement in a fundamentally timeless universe. Recent experimental work by Natalia Ares and colleagues on quantum clock thermodynamics, published in Physical Review Letters (November 2025), reveals that measurement costs dominate quantum timekeeping. This paper demonstrates that both developments inadvertently confirm what Experiential Empiricism (EE) established through logical analysis: external temporal succession is an unjustified metaphysical assumption, and what we call "time" is experiential structure within present moments rather than a metaphysical dimension we traverse. The physics is accidentally doing EE while claiming to do something else. No new experiment is needed to establish what burden of proof already demonstrates.