The End of Time
Time is an illusion. Although the laws of physics create a powerful impression that time is flowing, in fact there are only timeless `nows'. In The End of Time, the British theoretical physicist Julian Barbour describes the coming revolution in our understanding of the world: 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. Barbour believes that only the most radical of ideas can resolve the conflict between these two theories: that there is, quite literally, no time at all. The End of Time is the first full-length account of the crisis in our understanding that has enveloped quantum cosmology. Unifying thinking that has never been brought together before in a book for the general reader, Barbour reveals the true architecture of the universe and demonstrates how physics is coming up sharp against the extraordinary possibility that the sense of time passing emerges from a universe that is timeless. The heart of the book is the author's lucid description of how a world of stillness can appear to be teeming with motion: in this timeless world where all possible instants coexist, complex mathematical rules of quantum mechanics bind together a special selection of these instants in a coherent order that consciousness perceives as the flow of time.
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What Hacker News says
- I also recommend the non-fiction physics book “The End of Time” by Julian Barbour. It explains these ideas directly, and inspired Stephenson to write Anathem.
Weirdly, I happened to be reading all 3 of these around the same time, not initially realizing they were connected.
- I am making the distinction of what we perceive to be reality to actual reality.
Distance is a human concept. The moment we stop thinking distance does not exist. It may be a limitation that we perceive distance as something to be overcome through rocket ships and not through other methods.
Time is also in the same category. If you want to read a good book on the topic read “the end of Time quote by Jason Barbour.
- You might enjoy Julian Barbour's theory of timeless physics, as described in his book "the End of Time".
- You might want to read some of Julian Barbour's writing, in particular his "The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics" where he tries to explain a theory of timelessness with an apparent arrow of time.
Here is a rather long interview I found (and only skimmed to confirm its mostly relevant): https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-end-of-time
- Julian Barbour's The Discovery of Dynamics goes into great detail on absolute vs. relative pre-Einstein. His The End of Time reviews the ideas at a more popular level and continues the story into the 20th C.
- Thank you very much for saying so!
It's a philosophy I've assembled myself from many sources, so there's no one book about it, but definitely a lot of sources of inspiration.
My understanding of the nature of time comes mainly from Julian Barbour's book "the End of Time", which itself is not an easy read and took me a long time to digest. Although, the philosophy is compatible with more conventional theories of time, as long as it postulates time as a structure that is somehow internal to a universe.
There's endless literature about Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata, although since it's used just as a metaphor here, it's enough to just play with the game itself for a while. Greg Egan's "Permutation City", while fiction, is an interesting exploration of the concept of the boundary between a simulated universe and the reality that contains it.
For more about how causality in our universe arises as a consequence of specific properties of nature, I'm not sure exactly what to recommend but maybe Feynman's lectures on physics are a good place to start.
For other perspectives on causality, Judea Pearl's "Causality" is a classic. But heavy.
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