Julian Barbour Quotes

Probabilities without things are... nothings.

Richard Feynman... said, "Time is what happens when nothing else does." ...[T]hat's ...not the right way to think about time.

(quote at 14:08 of 1:54:14)

How do you define duration? What does it mean to say that a second today is the same as a second tomorrow? Newton in his... Principia... 1687, gave a... definition of absolute time, which he says flows uniformly without relation to anything external... [H]e says... if nothing... were to happen in the universe... if everything froze... time would still pass uniformly. ...[S]o ...time exists before anything else...

[I]n 1898... Henri Poincaré wrote... "On the Measure of Time" and he said... there are two fundamental problems to do with time. One... with the definition of duration... What does it mean to say that a second today is the same... [H]e said there's another issue... [not] so widely recognized. ...[H]ow do you define simultaneity at spatially separated points?

There is nothing in between... [NOWs]. Each are separate snapshots. ...These [real photographs] ...are not changed by ...reversing the order ...It may be convenient for ...for the way we think about the world and for ordering our experiences, to suppose that these come in a certain order; but ...the picture is not changed... the snapshot is... self-contained.

[W]hat we call yesterday is self-contained and has its experience of being yesterday, and today has memories of yesterday; and therefor I say that it's later... but each is completely self-contained, and there's no reason why you should put one... here, and another one there...

If we are to speak about ontology, as opposed to efficient coding in communication channels, the most important symbol in (1) is not <math>p</math> for probability but <math>i</math> for the thing, or configuration, that has the probability <math>p_i</math>.

Einstein... revealed... extraordinary things... [H]is space and time seem to be knit together in a way you can't pull them apart... [S]omeone moving relative to me at any speed would... divide space and time in different ways... [T]he huge excitement about simultaneity meant that the... issue of duration has... been forgotten...

[W]e must distinguish three kinds of information: Shannon’s information, the uncertainty as to which message will be selected from a source; factual information, the content of such a message; and intrinsic semantic information, which distinguishes a random message, or configuration, from one that carries meaning and to some extent explains its... genesis. All... have... underpinning in things.

If you could look microscopically... at... my molecules... you would not recognize me from one second to another. In my body, every second, one hundred million million million... hemoglobin molecules... is destroyed, and the same number is created. So... at each split second, I'm really a very different person.

Information theory would never have got off the ground if structured things—configurations—did not exist.

[T]ime is really an illusion... and motion too... [T]hey are not really there in the external world. They are put into the world by us, in the way we interpret it, and by our brains...

[S]tability of solids, the fossils and rocks... exist... essentially unchanged. ...[T]he configuration carries intrinsic semantic information... different intelligent beings can in principle deduce the law or process.. Support for this is is the independent discovery of evolution by natural selection by Wallis and Darwin.

In fact, I once had a discussion with a distinguished astrophysicist who said to me, well, this is what Mach said, and this is what Mach did and what he required. And I said to him, now excuse me, if you don't mind me saying, what you've just told me is your interpretation of Dennis Sciama's interpretation of Einstein's interpretation of Mach. And he said you're quite right. I’ve never read a word of Mach.