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Julian Barbour Quotes

born 1937 United Kingdom

Julian Barbour (born in 1937) is a British physicist with research interests in quantum gravity and the history of science.

United Kingdom
Physicists

Random Julian Barbour quote

14 quotes

Information theory would never have got off the ground if structured things—configurations—did not exist.

Bit from It (2011)

Ontological primacy should not be given to information but to things, as has always been the standpoint of realists.

Bit from It (2011)

Thus, even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo... it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves...

Shannon-type message sources could not exist if the universe were not subject to laws of nature and far from thermal equilibrium.

Bit from It (2011)

There is one metalaw of science: it cannot exist without structured things. Structured variety is the ground of being. That is what gives content to both science and life.

Bit from It (2011)

Richard Feynman... said, "Time is what happens when nothing else does." ...[T]hat's ...not the right way to think about time.

Julian Barbour on the nature of time (2009)

I argue... this weakens but not necessarily destroys the argument that nature is fundamentally digital and continuity an illusion.

Bit from It (2011)

How do you define duration? What does it mean to say that a second today is the same as a second tomorrow?

Julian Barbour on the nature of time (2009)

Probabilities without things are... nothings.

Bit from It (2011)

I find no reason to reverse the standard assumption of physics... what we experience can be explained by the assumption of an external world governed by law.

Bit from It (2011)

[S]ymbols have no meaning if divorced from the entities that they represent.

Bit from It (2011)

Shannon information... [which] he also called entropy or uncertainty... involves things (...Shannon ...messages) and probabilities for those things.

Bit from It (2011)

There is nothing in between... [NOWs].

Killing Time (2000)

It is a mistake to believe that the digits 0 and 1, being abstract, represent the immaterial. Quite... the contrary... they stand for something quintessentially concrete.

Bit from It (2011)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Julian Barbour (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.