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“There Is No Such Thing As Time”
The “rebels” who fight the Big Bang theory are mostly attempting to grapple with the concept of time. They are philosophers as much as cosmologists, unsatisfied with the Big Bang, unimpressed with string theory and unconvinced of the multiverse. Julian Barbour, British physicist, author, and major proponent of the idea of timeless physics, is one of those rebels–so thoroughly a rebel that he has spurned the world of academics.
Julian Barbour’s solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.
“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers,” says Barbour. “People are sure time is there, but they can’t get hold of it. My feeling is that they can’t get hold of it because it isn’t there at all.” Barbour speaks with a disarming English charm that belies an iron resolve and confidence in his science. His extreme perspective comes from years of looking into the heart of both classical and quantum physics. Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-D entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change. In Barbour’s view, the question must be turned on its head. It is change that provides the illusion of time. Channeling the ghost of Parmenides, Barbour sees each individual moment as a whole, complete and existing in its own right. He calls these moments “Nows.”
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“As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows,” says Barbour, “and the question is, what are they?” For Barbour each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. “We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less.”
Barbour’s Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book’s spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity existing without time, existing outside of time. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them in a step-by-step fashion makes a story unfold. Still, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent. As Barbour says, “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” The physics of reality for Barbour is the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment. Instead all the different possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom throughout all of creation, exist simultaneously. Barbour’s Nows all exist at once in a vast Platonic realm that stands completely and absolutely without time.
“What really intrigues me,” says Barbour, “is that the totality of all possible Nows has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical
rules.” The question of “before” the Big Bang never arises for Barbour because his cosmology has no time. All that exists is a landscape of configurations, the landscape of Nows. “Platonia is the true arena of the universe,” he says, “and its structure has a deep influence on whatever
physics, classical or quantum, is played out in it.” For Barbour, the Big Bang is not an explosion in the distant past. It’s just a special place in Platonia, his terrain of independent Nows.
Yammer all you want about the ‘big bang’. Who or what created the ‘big bang’? Whatever created the ‘big bang’; what created that? See? You can’t win.
FFS time is relative, not nonexistent. The Big Bang theory only ever worked up to galactic level. After that it falls flat on its arse, because there are rivers of galaxies all going in different directions and speeds which completely disproves it. To try and force it to work passed the galactic level the Big Bang supporters have added string and then multiple string theories (additional dimensions). Which is more or less on a par with Puff the magic dragon did it. ie complete BS.
ALL the evidence shows the Universe consists of smaller cycles within bigger ones. There was no Big Bang because the Universe has always existed. It is a false premise to assume it didn’t exist or there was a beginning to it.
I agree with Barbour that all we have are “Nows” – so the interesting questions have to do with the landscape or structure of the “Nows”. Why does one particular “Now” occur now within a certain landscape and not some other “Now”? And knowing that “Nows” are interrelated in some way, can we influence this particular “Now” that is happening now to affect the landscape of “Nows” around us?
Now now…
Nowism,
Now is forever, all of time is only now
Now cannot exist in yesterday or tomorrow
Now is all things, all things are alive
Now knows no fear, fear is past and future only
Now is real, past and future do not live
Now never dies, past and future will die with you
Now is always there, but we rarely notice it
Yet we are alive only now
The Rouge Poet
I sincerely wish I could go to the “now” of my 21st birthday, but that was “then.”