The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

Several people who have helped me greatly are mentioned in the text and notes, where it seemed more appropriate to express my gratitude to them. All of them also helped by reading some or all of an early draft and making comments. I am also grateful to several others (listed here in no particular order) who did the same: Dr Tiffany Stern, Michael Pawley, David Rizzo, Mark Smith, Dr Fotini Markopoulou, Gretchen Mills Kubasiak (with particularly detailed and helpful comments), Oliver Pooley, Dr Joy Christian, Cyril Aydon, Dr John Purser, Jason Semitecolos, Todd Heywood, John Wheeler (this is not J.A. Wheeler, though he did read the later draft, for which I am most grateful), Christopher Richards, Michael Ives, Elizabeth Davis and Ian Phelps. Joyce Aydon, Mark Smith and Tina Smith helped greatly with the preparation of the text. I should like to thank too Steve Farrar and his editor Tim Kelsey, who went to great trouble to report my ideas accurately in an article (entitled ‘Time’s assassin’!) in the Sunday Times in October 1998.

I am especially indebted to my friend Dierck Liebscher of the Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, who prepared all the computer-generated diagrams (and also made helpful comments on the text).

Both my editors (Peter Tallack for the UK edition, Kirk Jensen for the North American edition) have done very well what editors of a book like this should do: be supportive but insist that it is for the popular market, not an academic text. It is not for me to judge how readable the final result is, but to the extent that it is, my readers must be grateful to them, as I am. I am also grateful to my copy-editor, John Woodruff, for numerous stylistic improvements and his thorough work. Lee Smolin, who appears often in the main text, needs to be mentioned especially here too, since he made the most valuable suggestion that I write the introductory chapters that comprise Part 1. Without these, the book in its first draft was much tougher.

My wife, Verena, and our children have been wonderfully supportive.

I also want to thank here my literary agent Katinka Matson and her partner John Brockman, founder of Brockman, Inc., not only for finding me quite the best publishers and editors I could hope for but also for a remark of John’s that encouraged me to write the kind of book this has become. According to John, ‘Roger Penrose has found the right way to write popular science today. He’s really writing for his colleagues, but he is letting the public look over his shoulder.’ For myself, I have certainly tried to write primarily for the general reader, but, in a reversal of John’s aphorism, I shall be more than happy if my colleagues look over my shoulder. This is a serious book, and it draws its inspiration from the way Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind engages with intensity – passion, even – both the interested public and working scientists. That is what gives his book its cutting edge and thereby makes it more absorbing for the non-specialist. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is another example that comes to mind.

I have left to the end one other important person – you, the reader. As you will know from the Preface, I have tried throughout my life to fund my own research and would like to continue to do so. Every copy of this book that is bought (and borrowed from a library) helps me in this way. Thank you, and I do hope you get some pleasure from this book. I have enjoyed writing it. I hope to continue popularizing the study of time and will post details on my Website (www.julianbarbour.com) together with any significant developments of which I become aware in the study of time.

PART 1

The Big Picture in Simple Terms

As explained in the Preface, I start with three chapters in which I have attempted to present my main ideas with the minimum of technical details. The main aim is to introduce a definite way of thinking about instants of time without having to suppose that they belong to something that flows relentlessly forward. I regard instants of time as real things, identifying them with possible instantaneous arrangements of all the things in the universe. They are configurations of the universe. In themselves, these configurations are perfectly static and timeless. But how and why can something static and timeless be experienced as intensely dynamic and temporal?

That is what I hope to explain in simple terms in these first three chapters.

CHAPTER 1

The Main Puzzles

THE NEXT REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS