Julian Barbour

Julian Barbour

Julian B. Barbour (* 1937 ) is a British physicist. It deals with the basics of gravity and the history of science.

Barbour grew up in South Newington (Oxfordshire), studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge , began a doctorate in astrophysics in Munich and received his doctorate in 1968 at the University of Cologne under Peter Mittelstaedt on the fundamentals of general relativity . Until 1996 he mainly worked as a translator for Russian scientific journals and then devoted himself to his basic research. He wrote a popular science book ( The end of time ) in which he advocates the thesis that time is only an illusion and only change can be measured.

Barbour is strongly influenced by Ernst Mach and his empirical philosophy, researched and published on Mach's principle and wrote a book on the history of the principles of dynamics (based on Ernst Mach's The Mechanics in Their Development ). With the Italian physicist Bruno Bertotti , he developed a dynamic theory ( called best matching by him ), which implements Mach's principle and does not assume space-time.

In 2008 he was visiting professor at Oxford.

His essay The Nature of Time won first prize in a 2008 competition organized by the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi).

Fonts

• with Bruno Bertotti: Mach's principle and the structure of dynamical theories. In: Proc. Roy. Soc. A, Volume 382, ​​1982, p. 295.
• Leibnizian time, Machian dynamics and quantum gravity. In: Roger Penrose , Christopher Isham (Eds.): Quantum concepts in space and time , Oxford University Press, 1986.
• The emergence of time and its arrow from timelessness. In: J. Halliwell (Ed.): Physical origins of time asymmetry , Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Editor with Herbert Pfister : Mach's principle. From Newton's Bucket to Quantum Gravity , Birkhäuser, 1995 ( Einstein Studies , Volume 6, therein by Barbour: Introduction, Mach before Mach , General relativity as a perfectly Machian theory ).
• The End of Time: The Next Revolution in our Understanding of the Universe , Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-297-81985-2 ; ISBN 0-19-511729-8 ( Preprint 2009 , arxiv.org).
• The Discovery of Dynamics: A Study from a Machian Point of View of the Discovery and the Structure of Dynamical Theories , Oxford University Press, 2001 (first as Absolute or relative motion?, Volume 1 The Discovery of Dynamics ).
• with Brendan Z. Foster, Niall Ó Murchadha: Relativity without relativity. In: Classical and Quantum Gravity , Volume 19, 2002, p. 3217.
• The Nature of Time. Script, 2008 ( essay contest file, pdf ; arXiv: 0903.3489 [gr-qc], links to pdf and others).

Web links

• Homepage
• Portrait at Kurzweil
• Telephone interview with Julian Barbour about his contribution to the Templeton Foundation competition "The Nature of Time".

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nature of Time, Competition 2008 , fqxi.org.