The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe [ペーパーバック]

I'm not a physicist by profession though I conduct my own general inquiries into foundational issues of mathematical physics. I have read this book and I am deeply impressed and intrigued by the whole wealth of ideas and research works used by Julian to formulate his key concepts. As I read about Julian's life I find him a very committed scientist to probe deeper issues. While this book avoids explicit use of mathematical equations nevertheless, one needs to do a background study on his referenced papers in order to understand arguing grounds of this book.

There is only Quantum Statics! This is the key concept (and also mathematically argued) main theme of this book as Julian himself puts this on 2nd paragraph of page 253.

Now in my view this goes against all the impressions and ideas we have from what is generally considered as changing/temporal universe. It is so obvious that all is about motion and change and (almost) all formulations of general relativity and quantum mechanics do involve a time coordinate in order to capture this so basic observation, rate of change!

This is where Julian goes beyond or (deeper into) generally introduced framework of physics and attempts to introduce a Machian formulation of general relativity to probe into roots of (apparent) conflict among unification efforts of Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity: introduce a space of all possible relative configurations, called Platonia, which contains all possible relative configurations of everything that could ever exist(I'm adding some bits of my own wording here) and try to employ intriguing concepts/tools like `Best Matching' and `Machian Distinguished Simplifier' to trace how a notion of change comes into our ordinary formulation of dynamics. I consider these as requisites to grasp this book. Julian uses simple examples to convey his concepts.

As much as I understand Julian's works, it could be the implications of ideas are so powerful that if understood properly and imagined for their repercussions, they would open a door to a new view of workings of universe, reconciliation of classical field theories is one of them plus hint at deeper imports of gauge fields as derivative of Best Matching (expert readers may refer to Bruno Bertotti's papers in this regard).

I would rather not make any philosophical conclusions for the message that our universe is actually is static universe but I would encourage those readers of Heidegger's works in phenomenology of time and being to match Julian's ideas with Martin Heidegger's open ended inquiries.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in nature of time; there are many other books written on the subject but this one is an exception. As for me it helped me with better understanding of classical dynamics.

Alireza

I purchased this book because it was advertised as being readable even by a layperson (someone not particular scientifically literate). My impression after reading the book is that you will not get much out of it unless you have a strong scientific background. I would like to hear from others who disagree with my assessment.