Information Looking for Its Owner: A Supercooled-Water Clock Test That Separates Two Readings of Time-Gel

This document is a pre-experimental protocol. No measurements are reported.

Supercooled water at −10 °C keeps forming and dissolving ice-like clusters until one crosses a critical size; the temperature then jumps to 0 °C within milliseconds and an irreversible record is born. The protocol asks whether a clock inside the freezing water runs slow, and what it responds to.

Time-Gel Theory (v12.1) ties local clock rate to the local density of irreversible interaction. Two readings are compared: the rate reading (primary), in which the clock responds to local entropy production and slows only while the state changes, and the stock reading (rival), in which it stays slow while the record exists. A new entropy-matched control cell, producing the same entropy as the freezing cell but no crystal, separates the two.

The design includes heat- and entropy-matched controls, a dose arm, freeze–melt cycling, a glass arm, internal decay-constant clocks, pre-registration, blinding, a rival-explanation table and explicit falsification criteria. Under the rate reading the experiment is not expected to beat the existing atomic-clock bound; its value is a first bound on the stock reading and a test that tells the two readings apart.

Project website: https://timegeltheory.org