DOES TIME EVEN EXIST?

                                                                   Julian Barbour.



JULIAN BARBOUR COMMENTS;
My basic idea is that time as such does not exist. There is no invisible river of time. But there are things that you could call instants of time, or ‘Nows’. As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they? They are arrangements of everything in the universe relative to each other in any moment, for example, now.

We have the strong impression that you and I are sitting opposite each other, that there’s a bunch of flowers on the table, that there’s a chair there and things like that—they are there in 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 in a definite mutual relationship. The interconnected totality becomes my basic thing, a Now. There are many such Nows, all different from each other. That’s my ontology of the universe—there are Nows, nothing more, nothing less.