Julian Barbour Quotations

There are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time; or better, a now. As we live we seem to move through a succession of instants of time, nows, and the question is, what are they? There are where everything in the universe is at this moment, now.

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.

If nothing happened, if nothing changed, time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change we see occurring all around us, not time. In fact, time doesn't exist.

What really intrigues me is that the totality of all possible Nows of any definite kind has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in the country is a Now.

My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.