From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Dec 06 1999 - 14:33:34 MST
At 07:08 PM 5/12/99 -0500, Bob Owen wrote:
> THE END OF TIME
> A Talk With Julian Barbour
>Reading Barbour's work, I was reminded again and
>again of a poem by Henry Vaughan [1622-1695]. I must quote it
>from memory, so forgive any literal errors:
>
> I saw Eternity the other night,
> Like a great ring of pure and endless light
I always crack up when I see that, because the first line is almost a
perfect example of the literary crime of bathos. Sorry. `I had a drink with
Bill the other night.' `Really? I saw Eternity.' `Oh, good. In fine form,
was it?' `Looked okay to me, Roger. Another pint?' `Ta.'
Julian Barbour's book is startling lucid for a popularized treatment of
such an arcane topic. He avoids equations heroically, uses splendid and
usually intelligible diagrams, and fails to convince me - but it's fun
trying to follow him. His ideas resemble those of David Deutsch, that
uncompromising Many Worlds-er, which isn't surprising since they've been
discussing this stuff for years. The basic stumbling block for me is his
key idea, which I will vulgarize horribly: there are no causal links
between today's events and yesterday's (yester-Planck time's), just a kind
of fossilized pseudo-history embedded as `records' in each instantaneous
snapshot or `time capsule', one of the many configuration spaces in
Platonia, his timeless N-dimensional phase space. This is so like Gosse's
conjecture (I believe it was Gosse) that *actual* fossils were planted in
the earth by God to create a sort of false history, like Adam's navel, that
it's rather hard not to smile.
But the book should be read, it's fun.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:58 MST