The End of Time (book)

The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe, also sold with the alternate subtitle The Next Revolution in Physics, is a 1999 popular science book in which the author Julian Barbour argues that time exists merely as an illusion.

The book begins by describing how Barbour's view of time evolved. After taking physics in graduate school, Barbour went to Cologne for Ph.D work on Einstein's theory of gravity. However he became preoccupied with the idea proposed by Ernst Mach that time is nothing but change. A remark by Paul Dirac prompted him to reconsider some mainstream physical assumptions. He worked as a translator of Russian scientific articles and remained outside of academic institutions which provided him time to pursue his research as he desired.

For some twenty years Barbour sought to reformulate physics in the spirit of Mach but found that his results have been already discovered in a different form called ADM formalism. He nearly gave up research, became involved in politics (p. 238) and began writing books on the history of physics. His interest however was rekindled after talking with Lee Smolin and reflecting on quantum mechanics. Barbour came to the conclusion that "If the Machian approach to classical dynamics is correct, quantum cosmology will have no dynamics. It will be timeless. It must also be frameless" (p. 232). He develops this view in the book.

He acknowledges also that John Bell presented in 1980 a "quantum mechanics for cosmologists" which comes in close agreement with his conclusions, except on the point about the reality of time (p. 301).

Barbour recounts that he read a newspaper article about Dirac's work in which he was quoted as saying: "This result has led me to doubt how fundamental the four-dimensional requirement in physics is". The nature of time as a fourth dimension or something else became the topic of research.

Cognisant of the counter-intuitive nature of his fundamental claim, Barbour eases the reader into the topic by first endeavouring to persuade the reader that our experiences are, at the very least, consistent with a timeless universe, leaving aside the question as to why one would hold such a view.

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