Photo © Julian Barbour
Julian Barbour
THEORETICAL PHYSICIST
Professor Julian Barbour is a British theoretical physicist and visiting professor at the University of Oxford. He lives and works in rural Oxfordshire, choosing early in his career to eschew the academic environment in favour of independence.
His 1999 book The End of Time advanced the radical notion of timeless physics: that time, as we perceive it, does not exist as anything other than an illusion. His work addresses deficits in existing theories of time including Einstein’s general relativity, and the problems encountered when trying to reconcile the laws of gravity observed on the scale of stars and galaxies with the laws of quantum mechanics that govern the smallest particles.