#101 Meet The Physicist Who Believes Time Doesn’t Exist

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


…





Timestamps:


00:00:00 What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Life Question


00:03:07 Weather Observer in the Canadian Arctic


00:05:31 The Dirac Article That Changed Everything


00:08:28 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


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