Episode
#101 Meet The Physicist Who Believes Time Doesn’t Exist
- Podcast
- Giants Shoulder
- Published
- Mar 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 6019
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/episodes/101-meet-the-physicist-who-believes-time-doesn-t-exist/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/101-meet-the-physicist-who-believes-time-doesn-t-exist.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Dr. Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who has spent over sixty years working from a 17th-century farmhouse in Oxfordshire on the deepest question in physics — what is time? His answer: it doesn't exist. He completed the project Newton declared impossible and Einstein never finished, built two bestselling books around it, and at 88 remains one of the most original thinkers alive.Expect to learn why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation implies the universe is frozen and nothing evolves, what Shape Dynamics is and why only ratios and relations are real, why your brain is a "time capsule" containing the complete illusion of a past, how consciousness might add all the colour and motion to a bare mathematical skeleton, why Newton's gravity might secretly be a theory of variety, and why Barbour believes quantum mechanics itself could be replaceable, and much more … Timestamps: 00:00:00 What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Life Question 00:03:07 Weather Observer in the Canadian Arctic 00:05:31 The Dirac Article That Changed Everything 00:08:28 Phoning Paul Dirac at Cambridge 00:12:23 Why Dirac Rejected Four-Dimensional Spacetime 00:15:28 Hamilton, Quaternions and the Dublin Bridge 00:19:36 The Straw Poll with Hawking That Made Spanish Headlines 00:22:08 The Titanic Analogy for the Problem of Time 00:27:26 What the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation Actually Says 00:31:00 Time Capsules: Why Your Memories Don't Prove Time Passed 00:35:03 Flow States and the Experience of Time 00:37:08 The Kingfisher in Flight: Consciousness Plays the Movie 00:40:47 Psychedelics, Pollan and Consciousness 00:44:13 Materialism vs Idealism: Where Does Barbour Stand? 00:48:33 Complex Wavefunctions and the Born Density 00:53:16 The Three-Body Collision Problem 00:55:33 Leibniz, Monads and the Liv…