Article from Discover Magazine.

[infinitethoughts]

Article from DISCOVER Magazine | Science and Technology News back in 2000.

From Here to Eternity
Imagine a universe with no past or future, where time is an illusion and everyone is immortal. Welcome to that world, says physicist Julian Barbour
by Tim Folger


Time seems to stand still in south newington, a secluded village ringed by rolling green hills about 20 miles north of Oxford, England. The 1,000-year-old baptismal font in the town's church, the thatch-roofed houses, and the tidy gardens along narrow lanes all appear unchanged by the passage of centuries. Standing on the roof of the church's bell tower on a warm, late-summer day, Julian Barbour, a theoretical physicist with some extraordinary notions about the nature of time, points to his home, known as College Farm, which borders the ancient church.

"It looks almost exactly as it did when it was built 340 years ago," says Barbour. "The barn is also from the 17th century. Virtually all the houses you see around are from about 1640 to 1720. The long, low house is the one I grew up in. That's my parents' house. It dates from about 1710 to 1720." The entire scene is so placid one can't help but imagine that Barbour's childhood home, as well as the village and the surrounding landscape, will remain unchanged for the next 340 years.

Such utter quiescence suits Barbour, who is convinced the static harmony of South Newington extends past the horizon to the universe at large. In his view, this moment and all it holds— Barbour himself, his American visitor, Earth, and everything beyond to the most distant galaxies— will never change. There is no past and no future. Indeed, time and motion are nothing more than illusions.

In Barbour's universe, every moment of every individual's life— birth, death, and everything in between— exists forever. "Each instant we live," Barbour says, "is, in essence, eternal." That means each and every one of us is immortal. Like the perpetually unmoving lovers in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we are "for ever panting, and for ever young." We are also for ever aged and decrepit, on our deathbeds, in the dentist's chair, at Thanksgivings with our in-laws, and reading these words.

Barbour fully realizes how outrageous the notion of a world without time sounds. "I still have trouble accepting it," he says. But then, common sense has never been a reliable guide to understanding the universe— physicists have been confounding our perceptions since Copernicus first suggested that the sun does not revolve around Earth. After all, we don't feel the slightest movement as the spinning Earth hurtles through the void at some 67,000 miles per hour. Our sense of the passage of time, Barbour argues, is just as wrongheaded as the credo of the Flat Earth Society.

Barbour has been preoccupied with studying the basic properties of time for four decades. It's an issue he believes most theoretical physicists have ignored."Given what a fascinating thing time is, it's surprising how few physicists have made a serious attempt to study time and say exactly what it is," he says. "It's an unusual gap." At the outset Barbour didn't think he would have any fresh insights he could bring to the topic. "I don't regard myself as being at all talented. I struggle to do equations," he says, laughing. "But I just got very interested in the subject and found that very few people have really thought seriously about it."

Perhaps Barbour himself wouldn't have been able to devote nearly 40 years of his, well, time to the problem if it hadn't been for his unique background. Unlike most of his colleagues, he doesn't work at a university or a government lab— he is one of the world's few freelance theoretical physicists. Nevertheless, his credentials are solid, and prominent physicists take him— and his unconventional ideas— quite seriously.

"He has some wild ideas, but he definitely knows what he's talking about when it comes to these fundamental issues," says Carlo Rovelli, who works at the Center for Theoretical Physics in Luminy, France. Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at Pennsylvania State University, agrees: "Barbour is one of the few people I know who went out on their own and succeeded in doing several things that were important and would not have been easy to do in a conventional career."

After receiving his doctorate in physics from the University of Cologne in 1968, Barbour, who is now 63, decided he didn't want to follow a traditional academic career, with the inevitable pressure to publish or perish. So he supported his wife and four children by translating Russian scientific articles and worked on physics on the side, publishing scholarly papers every few years. Outside academia, he was free to explore his interest in time without worrying about tenure or funding for what might seem an arcane pursuit.

Until recently, Barbour's provocative work was little known beyond a rarefied circle of physicists. That changed earlier this year with the publication of his latest book, The End of Time, in which he presents his case for a universe where time, despite all appearances to the contrary, plays no role.

Continued here.

[Calculusaurus]

*whew*... long article.

Philosophically, time is quite problematic. Given our current philisophical difficulties with the concept of time, it's clear that we have yet to fully understand it.

However, this does not imply that the objective behavior of time is not understood. In a classical and relativistic model, we actually fully understand time. Sure, we don't understand it from some sort of deep, philosophical sense, but neither do we understand matter, gravity, forces, fields, or anything for that matter. Generally, time behaves quite well in our classical and relativistic models.

Just because something doesn't make sense philosophically doesn't necessarily mean our scientific models of it break down.

I'd have to read his book to get into his argument more in-depth, but from the article it doesn't seem like he's really presenting anything revolutionary to the table. The subjectivist arguments outlined in the article didn't lead to his conclusions. Yes, time is an illusion, but so is matter for that matter (hehehe).

The physicist argued that because time is handled differently in quantum mechanics and relativity, it must be time that ties these seemingly disjoint theories together. But just as time acts "weird" in relativity, matter acts "weird" in quantum mechanics (particles-as-waves stuff). Physicists have been straining their brains over these two strange theories and how to tie them together in a grand unified theory for several decades now. I'm not sure that this physicist's "revelation" that time is the secret really sheds light onto anything.

A fine article, but it definitely suffers from science media's tendency to sensationalize anything remotely suggestive of interesting.