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Julian Barbour

37 quotes

“Thus, even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo... it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Absolute or Relative Motion, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 226
“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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(quote at 14:08 of 1:54:14)”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[Time|[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...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you could freeze the camera now and... show me as I am, and all the atoms... and... the whole universe... like a snapshot, the would be... a NOW.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f you imagine two NOWs... there will be some difference between them, and if you work out some weighted average of all of that difference... you can call that... the amount of time between them. ...[T]his has nothing to do with some substance... It's just difference between those two things. ...[T]his is the quantity that is... being measured by my watch...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]his is very different from the Newtonian picture where Newton presupposes there's a river of time flowing, that is there before anything is put into it. ...[T]he things are there first, and the time is deduced from it afterwards.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A NOW] has no duration. ...[I]t's absolutely instantaneous. There is no thickness to it. Nothing changes. ...So these s, in one sense, are truly eternal, because they never change, and on the other hand, because nothing changes, they are experienced as a flash. ...[It]'s a nice contradiction... [T]he eternal is experienced as a flash, because nothing changes.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Richard Feynman... said, "Time is what happens when nothing else does." ...[T]hat's ...not the right way to think about time.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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?”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poincaré clearly posed these two problems and... seven years later... independently... Einstein and Poincaré... solved... the problem of defining definition at spatially separated points...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wheeler argued that anything physical... derives its... existence... from discrete detector-elicited information-theoretic answers to yes or no quantum binary choices: bits.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]hings, not information, are primary. ... 'bit' derives from 'it'.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I argue... this weakens but not necessarily destroys the argument that nature is fundamentally digital and continuity an illusion.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ontological primacy should not be given to information but to things, as has always been the standpoint of realists.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find no reason to reverse the standard assumption of physics... what we experience can be explained by the assumption of an external world governed by law.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a mistake to believe that the digits 0 and 1, being abstract, represent the immaterial. Quite... the contrary... they stand for something quintessentially concrete.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shannon information... [which] he also called entropy or ... involves things (...Shannon ...messages) and probabilities for those things.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[Symbols|[S]ymbols]] have no meaning if divorced from the entities that they represent.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The concepts of message and probability enable one, for a definite source of N messages, to define Shannon’s information. If p_i,\quad i = 1, 2, ..., N, is the relative probability of message i and \log p_i is its base-2 logarithm, then the information I of the given source is(1) \quad I = - \sum_{k=1}^N p_i \log p_i.The minus sign makes I positive because all probabilities, which are necessarily greater than or equal zero, are less than unity (their sum being\textstyle \sum_{i}^N p_i = 1, so that their logarithms are all negative.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“and variety are central to my critique of 'it from bit'. For we can only talk meaningfully about a thing, including a , if it has distinguishing attributes. The way that they are knit together, as in the taste, shape and colour of an apple, defines the structure of the thing.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consider the example of a time capsule... geologists... establish[ed] detailed correlations between the structure of fossils and rocks... They concluded... an immense , vastly longer than the bible-deduced... 6000 years. They explained... a long process... in accordance with... laws of nature. They discovered ... and... present evidence for it extends today... to all branches of science, especially cosmology and genetics.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[wikt:stability#Noun|[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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e must distinguish three kinds of information: [1] Shannon’s information, the uncertainty as to which message will be selected from a source; [2] factual information, the content of such a message; and [3] 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.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shannon-type message sources could not exist if the universe were not subject to laws of nature and far from .”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Information theory would never have got off the ground if structured things—configurations—did not exist.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Probabilities without things are... nothings.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we are to speak about ontology, as opposed to efficient coding in communication channels, the most important symbol in (1) is not p for probability but i for the thing, or configuration, that has the probability p_i.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He... explain[ed] how the astronomers... had to grapple with the problem of defining definition, because for 2 1/2 millennia there had been just one standard of time... the rotation of the earth. ...[T]hat had provided an incredibly accurate clock. It's... lost only a few hours in 2 1/2 thousand years. ...Very easy to use. Astronomers only... had to glance at the night sky, at the... Big Dipper... to tell the time within a minute or two... But in the 1890s a crisis developed when they found that using the earth... and... Newton's laws of motion and gravity... the Moon was speeding up. ...[T]hey thought ...the earth was slowing down because of the tidal effects of the moon... and... this would mean that the earth was not a good timekeeper at the accuracy that they wanted.”
Julian Barbour (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source