#101 Meet The Physicist Who Believes Time Doesn’t Exist
The Giants Shoulder
Outro
Closing thanks and final remarks; Julian summarizes equilateral-start model and points to The Janus Point work.
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
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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
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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
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