Your comments on Barbour (non-academic etc) are ad hominem, I say so what? Being an academic may be an indicator for good work, but not more. And he did his Ph.D in physics anyway.
Julian Barbour’s work is unconventional.
Yes! Fine. Lovely. Science needs more unconventional thinkers. Let the evidence sort them out, but let’s not be against “unconventional” theories. Especially not when they are explanatorily powerful.
Many of his papers border on philosophy
There are two kinds of philosophy: the bad kind (Essay by Paul Graham criticising philosophy , “How to do philosophy”; Paul featured just recently on OC).
And the good kind: the kind Albert Einstein was actually performing when he examined the laws of physics and derived his GRT from general (philosophical?) considerations. His ideas were definitely unconventional at the time.
@Eli
Thanks for your Barbour series, I read Barbour about a year ago but had already before come to the conviction that the flow of time must be an illusion. In the end, a theory of everything must forego an “outside” time dimension. There can be no “supertime” (that’s what I call it ;-) ) above or outside the universe/multiverse, apart from relative configurations.
And if you would look at the whole universe from the outside (which is of course per definition impossible) the timeless and fundamentally static nature of everything would reveal itself quite simply (I’m getting carried away).
I hope many physicists read your post, as the Barbour theory deserves grad students working on the details—it is, I am deeply convinced, the right direction to pursue, difficulties in the formalism notwithstanding.
Time is, contrary to widespread belief, no mystery.
@Jess
Your comments on Barbour (non-academic etc) are ad hominem, I say so what? Being an academic may be an indicator for good work, but not more. And he did his Ph.D in physics anyway.
Julian Barbour’s work is unconventional.
Yes! Fine. Lovely. Science needs more unconventional thinkers. Let the evidence sort them out, but let’s not be against “unconventional” theories. Especially not when they are explanatorily powerful.
Many of his papers border on philosophy
There are two kinds of philosophy: the bad kind (Essay by Paul Graham criticising philosophy , “How to do philosophy”; Paul featured just recently on OC).
And the good kind: the kind Albert Einstein was actually performing when he examined the laws of physics and derived his GRT from general (philosophical?) considerations. His ideas were definitely unconventional at the time.
@Eli Thanks for your Barbour series, I read Barbour about a year ago but had already before come to the conviction that the flow of time must be an illusion. In the end, a theory of everything must forego an “outside” time dimension. There can be no “supertime” (that’s what I call it ;-) ) above or outside the universe/multiverse, apart from relative configurations.
And if you would look at the whole universe from the outside (which is of course per definition impossible) the timeless and fundamentally static nature of everything would reveal itself quite simply (I’m getting carried away).
I hope many physicists read your post, as the Barbour theory deserves grad students working on the details—it is, I am deeply convinced, the right direction to pursue, difficulties in the formalism notwithstanding.
Time is, contrary to widespread belief, no mystery.