Friday, January 22, 2010

Julian Barbour's Timeless Physics

There is an eccentric scientist in England. He lives near Oxford and his name is Barbour. It is not surprising to have an eccentric Englishman. It seems that they make a sport of that sort of thing in the British Isles.

What I want to bring out here is the similarity between Verlinde's and Barbour's views.

Barbour tells us that time does not exist, our brains go through some kind of ever existing movie, with patterned frames. If the patterns are similar, then our brain connects them and we say one follows after the other. We own some kind of innate pattern recognition camera, that allows us to search for little changes in the pictures, and order the pictures correctly. Somehow like the robotic Filippenko telescope: KAIT. Alex's group got the most distant Supernova Ia in 1998, and thus Adam Riess, was able to see the acceleration of the Universe. To deceive ourselves, Barbour claims, we just order the pictures in the movie and call that order time. Time does not exist, says this thinker.

Now cross the channel and go to Amsterdam, there you will find one of the Verlinde's twins, Erik; and he will tell you that if you zoom in, à la Kenneth Wilson; voilà: There you have it, a direction where the entropy gradient is biggest. That is the time direction. This way the combinatorial problem in Quantum Gravity could be solved. We have an algorithm to correctly choose, which way time grows. The way of entropy. I have to admit that Verlinde has a knack for turning things upside down. He turned Boltzmann's H Theorem into Verlinde's Information Creating Time Theorem. Barbour, would've been my hero, if he had this Dutch's ability. Positive proposal trump, cryptic constructs.

Timeless Physics? No: Timeful Entropy?: Yes

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