The End Of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe [Paperback]

The End of Time is a fascinating contribution to physics by a scholar and thinker who is taken seriously by physicists of the calibre of Wheeler and Smolin. But he has pursued a career outside the mainstream, living on a farm and refusing to get involved in traditional teaching and research. He argues that time is a purely local phenomenon, a way of seeing things, rather than something that actually meaningfully exists at the core of the Universe. This consists of a vast agglomeration of Nows, single moments whose relationship with each other is intimate, but not intrinsically one of causation.

"If time is removed from the foundations of physics, we shall not all suddenly feel that the flow of time has ceased. On the contrary, new timeless principles will explain why we do feel that time flows. The pattern of the first great revolution will be repeated. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler taught us that the Earth moves and rotates while the heavens stand still, but this did not change by one iota our direct perception that the heavens do move and that the Earth does not budge."

The many worlds hypothesis is also true and the worlds that derive from alternate possibility exist alongside each other moment-by-moment. Seeing things in this way solves the more recondite problems of quantum physics--Schrodinger's Cat is both dead, and alive, and never in the box in the first place and at a time before the box was thought of, and long dead all in a set of Nows that sit alongside each other in the Platonic realm which is underlying reality. There are no paradoxes because Sequence is an illusion: this is philosophical physics for those of you who like to have your brains hurt. --Roz Kaveney

In this book, theoretical physicist Julian Barbour describes the coming revolution in physics: a quantum theory of the universe that brings together Einstein's general theory of relativity (which denies the existence of a unique time) and quantum mechanics (which demands one).

Julian Barbour has worked on foundational issues in physics for 35 years, making important and original contributions to the theory of time and motion. Author of Absolute or Relative Motion?, a much-praised book on the history of science, he has contributed to several recent major television and radio programmes that have been broadcast worldwide. He is exceptional in having a leading reputation in the field while holding no academic position.