In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage, 1991), its
antihero, Billy Pilgrim, can see the whole of time at once. That Vonnegut’s
story is a must for physicist Julian Barbour isn’t too surprising. Seeing all
time at once is the thesis of his own book The End of Time
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999).
Barbour is now re-reading Erwin Schrödinger’s Space-Time
Structure (Cambridge University Press, 1985). The first time round it “gave
me the feeling I had understood general relativity overnight”, he says. He also
recommends James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games (Ballantine,
1987), which interprets life as…
