Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour (born 1937) is a British physicist with research interests in quantum gravity. He is the author of "" and "Absolute or Relative Motion? Volume 1, The Discovery of Dynamics", later retitled "The Discovery of Dynamics".

He holds the controversial view that time does not exist as anything other than an illusion, and that a number of physics' problems arise from assuming that it does exist. He argues that we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. "Change merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole. He calls these moments "Nows". It is all an illusion: there is no motion and no change. He argues that the illusion of time is what we interpret through what he calls "time capsules," which are "any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history."

Related work on the physics underlying the illusory nature of time can be found in "Memory Systems, Computation, and The Second Law of Thermodynamics", D. H. Wolpert, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 31, 743-785, 1992.

Barbour lives near Oxford, England. Since receiving his Ph.D. on the foundations of Einstein's general theory of relativity at the University of Cologne in 1968, he has supported himself and his family without a job in academia, working part-time as a translator.

Works

* "The End of Time", 1999, ISBN 0-297-81985-2 ; 2000, ISBN 0-19-511729-8 (paperback: ISBN 0-7538-1020-4)
* "The Discovery of Dynamics: A Study from a Machian Point of View of the Discovery and the Structure of Dynamical Theories", 2001, ISBN 0-19-513202-5
* "Absolute or Relative Motion?", 2006, ISBN 0-19-513203-3 (This is a paperback reprinting of "The Discovery of Dynamics".)

Co-author

* "Mach's Principle and the Structure of Dynamical Theories", J.B. Barbour, and B.Bertotti,1982RSPSA.382..295B
* "Unified Field Theories in the First Third of the 20th Century ", with Vladimir Pavlovich Vizgin, 1994, ISBN 0-8176-2679-4
* "Mach's Principle: From Newton's Bucket to Quantum Gravity", with Herbert Pfister, 1996, ISBN 0-8176-3823-7

Relevant work

* "Three dimensional geometry as the carrier of information about time", R.F. Baierlein, D.H. Sharp, and J.A. Wheeler, Phys. Rev. 126, 1864-1865 (1962)
* "On the recovery of Geometrodynamics from two different sets of first principles", E Anderson, http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0511070
* "Geometrodynamics: Spacetime or space?", E Anderson, http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0409123
* "The Mathematical Universe", M.Tegmark, http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

References

* [http://www.platonia.com/ Julian Barbour's website]

* "The Trouble with Physics" by Lee Smolin, pp. 321-322

External links

* [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/barbour/barbour_index.html The End Of Time: A Talk With Julian Barbour]
* [http://noorderlicht.vpro.nl/dossiers/4032610/hoofdstuk/4032611// Killing Time] A 25-minute feature about the idea that time is an illusion, filmed by Dutch TV in December 1999 and first shown early in 2000
* "Physics World" profile
* "The End of Time", [http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/barbour-time.html Chapter One.] (Requires free registration.)