The End of Time Quotes

“The mature brain is a time capsule. History resides in its structure.”
― Julian B. Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Yesterday seems to come before today, because today contains records (memories) of yesterday.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“We do not see things as they are but as the brain interprets them for us.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“By a time capsule, I mean any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“Thus, experienced time is linear, it can be measured and it has an arrow. These are not properties of an invisible river: they belong to concrete instants. Everything we know about time is garnered from them. Time is inferred from things. NEWTON”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“All the instants we have experienced are other worlds, for they are not the one we are in now.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Time is change, nothing more, nothing less.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“I regard space as a 'glue', or a set of rules, that binds things together. It is a plurality within a deep unity, and it makes a Now.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Nows within this now, rather like snapshots in an album. Each Now is separate and a world unto itself, but the richly structured Nows 'know' about one another because they literally contain one another in certain essential respects. As consciousness surveys many things at once in one Now, it is simultaneously present, at least in part, in other Nows. This awareness of many things in one could well exist in a much more pronounced form in other places in Platonia.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“A very good friend of mine, Michael Purser, once remarked that if my mother was the irresistible force, my father was surely the immovable object. Whatever the truth, I should not be here but for them. Being here is the supreme gift.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“The instant is not in time — time is in the instant.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is telling us, in its most direct interpretation, that the universe in its entirety is like some huge molecule in a stationary state and that the different possible configurations of this 'monster molecule' are the instants of time. Quantum cosmology become the ultimate extension of the theory of atomic structure, and simultaneously subsumes time.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Newton's picture is close to everyday experience. We do not see absolute space and time, but we do see something quite like them - the rigid Earth, which defines positions, and the Sun, whose motion is a kind of clock. Newton's revolution was the establishment of strict laws that hold in such a framework.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Zeno of Elea, who belonged to the same philosophical school as Parmenides, formulated a famous paradox designed to show that motion is impossible. After an arrow shot at a target has got halfway there, it still has half the distance to go. When it has gone half that distance, it still has half of the way to go. This goes on forever. The arrow can never reach the target, so motion is impossible. In normal physics, with a notion of time, Zeno's paradox is readily resolved. However, in my timeless view the paradox is resurrected, but the arrow never reaches the target for a more basic reason: the arrow in the bow is not the arrow in the target.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“What is especially striking about the earth is the way in which it contains time capsules nested within time capsules, like a Russian doll. Individual biological cells (properly interpreted) are time capsules from which biologists read genetic time. Organs within the body are again time capsules, and contain traces of the history and morphogenesis of our bodies. The body itself is a time capsule. History is written in a face, which carries a date - the approximate date of our birth. We can all tell the rough age of a person from a glance at their face. Wherever we look, we find mutually consistent time capsules - in grains of sand, in ripe cherries, in books in libraries. This consistent meshing of stories even extends far from the Earth and into the outermost reaches of the universe. The abundances of the chemical elements and isotopes in the gas of stars and the waters of the oceans tell the story of the stars and a Big Bang that created the lightest elements. It all fits together so well.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“But what did Copernicus say? We must be careful not to attribute to the heavens (Jupiter) what is truly in the Earth-bound observer. I could persuade my daughter that the motion of the Earth, not of Jupiter, gives rise to the retrograde motion. To interpret events, we must know where we stand and understand how that affects what we witness. But we observe the universe from the middle of a most intricate processing device, the human brain. How does that affect our interpretation of what we see?”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“The lesson we learned from Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo is here very relevant. They persuaded us, against what seemed to be overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Earth moves. They taught us to see motion where none appears. The notion of time capsules may help us to reverse that process-to see perfect stillness as the reality behind the turbulence we experience.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Cats don't leap in Platonia. They just are.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“Interestingly, consciousness and understanding are always tied to a short time span, which was called the specious present by the philosopher and psychologist William James (brother of novelist Henry). The specious present is closely related to the phenomenon of short-term memory and our ability to grasp and understand sentences, lines of poems and snatches of melody. It has a duration of up to about three seconds. The”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“somehow seems appropriate here: ‘If the end of the world is nigh, it is time to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes to Cincinnati twenty years late.’ The”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“The chain from cause to effects may be quite long and take surprising forms, but a cause there must be. It is unsatisfactory to suppose that we have a direct awareness of an invisible flow of time. Our sense of the passage of time and, even more basically, of seeing motion and knowing its direction, ought to have a cause we can get our hands on. The”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“conscious states somehow reflect physical states in the brain. Put in its crudest form, a brain scientist who knew the state of our brain would know our conscious state at that instant.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

“Now, my suggestion is this. There are no laws of nature, just one law of the universe. There is no dichotomy in it - there is no distinction between the law and supplementary initial or boundary conditions. Just one, all-embracing static equation. We can call it the universal equation. Its solutions (which may be one or many) must merely be well behaved, in the sense explained in the previous paragraph. It is an equation that creates structure as a first principle, just as the ordinary stationary Schrodinger equation creates atomic and molecular structure. This is because it attaches a ranking - a greater or lesser probability - to each conceivable static configuration of the universe.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“As a result, quantum processes can be regarded as being made up of many individual subprocesses taking place independently of one another. In Figure 43 the total process of the wave function 'swinging round' and becoming entangled is represented symbolically by the arrows as six individual subprocesses (or branches, to use Everett's terminology). In all of them, the pointer starts in the same position but ends in a different position. Everett makes the key assumption that conscious awareness is always associated with the branches, not the process as a whole. Each subprocess is, so to speak, aware only of itself. There is a beautiful logic to this, since each subprocess is fully described by the quantum laws. There is nothing within the branch as such to indicate that it alone does not constitute the entire history of the universe. It carries on in blithe ignorance of the other branches, which are 'parallel worlds' of which it sees nothing. The branches can nevertheless be very complicated. An impressive part of Everett's paper demonstrates how an observer (modelled by an inanimate computer) within one such branch could well have the experience of being all alone in such a multiworld, doing quantum experiments and finding that the quantum statistical predictions are verified.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Everett's proposal raises two questions. If many worlds do exist, why do we see only one and not all? Why do we not feel the world splitting? Everett answered both by an important property of quantum mechanics called linearity, or the superposition principle. It means that two processes can take place simultaneously without affecting each other. Consider, for example, Young's explanation of interference between two wave sources. Each source, when active alone, gives rise to a certain wave pattern. If both sources are active, the processes they generate could disturb each other drastically. But this does not happen. The wave pattern when both sources are active is found simply by adding the two wave patterns together. The total effect is very different from either of the individual processes, but in a real sense each continues unaffected by the presence of the other. This is by no means always the case; in so-called non-linear wave processes, the wave pattern from two or more sources cannot be found by simple addition of the patterns from the separate sources acting alone. However, quantum mechanics is linear, so the much simpler situation occurs.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Everett's proposal raises two questions. If many worlds do exist, wh do we see only one and not all? Why do we not feel the world splitting? Everett answered both by an important property of quantum mechanics called linearity, or the superposition principle. It means that two processes can take place simultaneously without affecting each other. Consider, for example, Young's explanation of interference between two wave sources. Each source, when active alone, gives rise to a certain wave pattern. If both sources are active, the processes they generate could disturb each other drastically. But this does not happen. The wave pattern when both sources are active is found simply by adding the two wave patterns together. The total effect is very different from either of the individual processes, but in a real sense each continues unaffected by the presence of the other. This is by no means always the case; in so-called non-linear wave processes, the wave pattern from two or more sources cannot be found by simple addition of the patterns from the separate sources acting alone. However, quantum mechanics is linear, so the much simpler situation occurs.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“The implications of this are startling. A single atomic particle - the object particle in Figure 43 - can, by becoming entangled with first the pointer and then the emulsion, and finally the conscious observer, split that observer (indeed the universe) into many different incarnations. In his paper in 1970 that at last brought Everett's idea to wide notice, Bryce Dewitt wrote:
I still recall vividly the shock I experienced on first encountering this multiworld concept. The idea of 10^100+ slightly imperfect copies of oneself constantly splitting into further copies, which ultimately become unrecognizable, is not easy to reconcile with common sense. Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“According to this, the state of a quantum system is some definite but abstract thing in an equally abstract Hilbert space. The one state can, so to speak, be looked at from different points of view. A cubist painting might give you a flavour of the idea. In relativity, different coordinate systems on space-time correspond to different decompositions into space and time. In quantum mechanics, the different coordinate systems, or bases, are equally startling in their physical significance. They determine what will happen if different kinds of measurement, say of position or of momentum, are made on the system by instruments that are external to the system. The state in Hilbert space is an enigmatic gem that presents a different aspect on all the innumerable sides from which it can be examined. As Leibniz would say, it is a city multiplied in perspective. Dirac was entranced, and spoke of the 'darling transformation theory'. He knew he had seen into the structure of things. What he saw was some real but abstract thing not at all amenable to easy visualization. But the multiplication of viewpoints and the mathematical freedom it furnished delighted him.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“Both electrons and photons can, depending on the circumstances, exhibit wave or particle behaviour. Otherwise they behave very differently. Many photons can be present simultaneously in the same state (a state being a characteristic set of properties of particles, such as position and direction of motion), but for electrons this is impossible-there can be at most one in any given state. The two kinds of particle have different statistical behaviour, so-called Fermi-Dirac statistics for electrons and Bose-Einstein statistics for photons. In fact, there are now known to be many different particles, each with an associated field. They satisfy either Fermi-Dirac statistics, and are thus called fermions, or Bose-Einstein statistics, in which case they are called Bosons. In addition, nearly all particles have an antiparticle. An antiparticle is identical to the original particle in some respects, but opposite to it in others; in particular, a particle and its antiparticle always have opposite charges.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe

“If certain simplicity conditions are imposed, only one theory out of the general family meets this condition. It is general relativity. It is this deeper unity that creates the criss-cross fabric of space-time and the great dilemma in the creation of quantum gravity. As we shall see, quantum mechanics needs to deal with three-dimensional things. The dynamical structure of general relativity suggests - and sufficiently strongly for Dirac to have made his 'counter-revolutionary' remark-that this may be possible. Yet general relativity sends ambivalent signals. Its dynamical structure says 'Pull me apart', but the four-dimensional symmetry revealed by Minkowski says 'Leave me intact." Only a mighty supervening force can shatter space-time.”
― Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe