Attempting Contact with Dirac and Early Influences

Dr. Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who has spent over sixty years working from a 17th-century farmhouse in Oxfordshire on the deepest question in physics — what is time? His answer: it doesn't exist.

He completed the project Newton declared impossible and Einstein never finished, built two bestselling books around it, and at 88 remains one of the most original thinkers alive.Expect to learn why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation implies the universe is frozen and nothing evolves, what Shape Dynamics is and why only ratios and relations are real, why your brain is a "time capsule" containing the complete illusion of a past, how consciousness might add all the colour and motion to a bare mathematical skeleton, why Newton's gravity might secretly be a theory of variety, and why Barbour believes quantum mechanics itself could be replaceable, and much more

…

Support The Channel:

Get 1 Month Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder

Timestamps: 00:00:00 What Is Time?

Julian Barbour's Life Question00:03:07

Weather Observer in the Canadian Arctic00:05:31

The Dirac Article That Changed Everything00:08:28

Phoning Paul Dirac at Cambridge

00:12:23 Why Dirac Rejected Four-Dimensional Spacetime

00:15:28 Hamilton, Quaternions and the Dublin Bridge

00:19:36 The Straw Poll with Hawking That Made Spanish Headlines

00:22:08 The Titanic Analogy for the Problem of Time

00:27:26 What the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation Actually Says

00:31:00 Time Capsules: Why Your Memories Don't Prove Time Passed

00:35:03 Flow States and the Experience of Time

00:37:08 The Kingfisher in Flight: Consciousness Plays the Movie

00:40:47 Psychedelics, Pollan and Consciousness

00:44:13 Materialism vs Idealism: Where Does Barbour Stand?00:48:33 Complex Wavefunctions and the Born Density

00:53:16 The Three-Body Collision Problem

00:55:33 Leibniz, Monads and the Living Mirror of the Universe

00:58:10 "I Am the Universe Seen from My Point of View"

01:04:01 The Punchline: Gravity Equals Variety

01:08:43 Buzsáki and How the Brain Keeps Time

01:13:46 Did Science Take a Wrong Turn in 150 BC?

01:19:32 Barbour's Ontology: Points, Distances, Ratios — That's It

01:25:34 "Invisible Time Is a Monumental Lie"

01:28:08 What Was There Before the Universe?

01:31:46 Newton's Gravity as a Theory of Recognisability

...

Buy Barbours Books The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics: https://amzn.to/4liP9zy

The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time: https://amzn.to/4bw3ZPI

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/