One of the physicists who has denied that time exists for 40 years is a peculiar man, a doctor of physics who decided not to follow the usual path of his colleagues and fight for a stable position in a university or research institute: Julian Barbour. Making a living as a translator of Russian scientific journals, the rest of his life is spent thinking about such fundamental issues as the nature of time.
According to Julian Barbour, the universe is nothing more than a great collection of moments and each of them a collection of things. He calls the collection of all these moments the heap . There is no point in wanting to temporarily order those different moments. They simply are, period. Nothing changes in time because there is no time, which is an illusion created by our brain.
In essence, the reasoning of those who think like Barbour is as follows. Imagine that you are going to see the movie Gone with the Wind on a quirky DVD player that randomly jumps back and forth : you’re watching the sequence where Scarlett swears she will never starve again, followed by the one where she meets Rhett Butler.
Nothing seems to make sense to you, but not to the protagonists of the film. In each sequence they do what they have to do and they always do. What’s more, if you could stop the movie and ask them what they think at that very moment, they would answer you exactly the same as if you were watching the movie on a DVD without that flaw . In each sequence they always have the memories that correspond to that sequence.
Well, our universe works exactly the same as that DVD: each moment in space-time is like each of the sequences in the film and what you are in each moment, which is now, is the product of your experience in that moment. precise instant. Your life, which is essentially your memory and your memories, is a set of slides (like the sequences in the movie) that provoke in our brain a sensation of passing time in the same way that happens when we watch a movie: not in it there is a passage of time, just a series of sequences recorded on a DVD. It is the player that leads us to think that we are watching time go by.
