Julian Barbour
(1937-)
Julian Barbour is a British physicist with a Ph.D. from University of Cologne on general relativity.
As an independent scholar, Barbour has published many articles and two influential books on the idea that time is an illusion,
The End of Time in 1999 and
Janus Point in 2020.
His theory is an update of the work of the English metaphysician
J.M.E.McTaggart, an idealist philosopher in the tradition of
G. W. F. Hegel and Francis H. Bradley.
McTaggart's 1908 book,
The Unreality of TIme, argued that time should not be thought of as a series of events in a past, present, and future, which he called the "A-series." In this standard view of time, an event in the future is thought to
change into a present event at the moment of time we arbitrarily call "now," then slip into becoming a "past" event. McTaggart thought this perception of changing time is an
illusion.
Barbour very briefly mentions McTaggart in his first book but not at all in the later book.
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