Julian Barbour Quotes

Thus, even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo... it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves...

[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.

There is one metalaw of science: it cannot exist without structured things. d variety is the ground of being. That is what gives content to both science and life.

Poincaré clearly posed these two problems and... seven years later... independently... Einstein and Poincaré... solved... the problem of defining definition at spatially separated points...

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.

Greek astronomers observed intricate motions of the sun, moon, and planets on the two-dimensional sky. They explained them—saved the appearances—by positing simple regular motions... in three dimensions. The success... [was] brought to a triumphant conclusion by Kepler...

[T]he work that I did with... has shown... time that is measured by clocks is... an average of all the changes in the universe.