Educational Media Reviews Online

Julian Barbour, the theoretical physicist who gained prominence with his book The End of Time, is at the center of a documentary exploring his thinking about the nature of the concept of time. This fascinating and provocative documentary not only presents Barbour's thinking in his own clearly elucidated words but does it with wit and flowing style.

Barbour claims that the scientific notion of time as presented by Christiaan Huygens, that is to say, being measured by a pendulum clock, is simply an average of all the changes in the universe. He mentions that Huygens disagreed with Isaac Newton's description of the universe existing in an invisible framework of absolute space in which things moved with a time factor that flowed like an invisible river. He quotes Ernst Mach who felt that it was utterly beyond our powers to measure the changes of things by time, but rather, that time is an abstraction at which we arrive from the changes of things. In his attempt to marry Einstein's Theory of Relativity where time is flexible with Quantum Mechanics where it is independent of the world, the solution he came to is that there is no time.

Barbour states that time itself as we understand it does not exist, it is an illusion which is made to appear as if it were linear by our own minds. He explains this with his concept of "now" which he describes as being very much like a Polaroid snapshot of the universe, completely frozen but self-contained. Time ends up being the measure of space between separate and unrelated nows. This is visually demonstrated by the construction of a 3-D model of eternity in a non-linear fashion.

Barbour's concepts and explanations lend themselves beautifully to the visual exploitation they receive in this film. Documentary film is by nature usually governed by a linearity of narrative. When the subject is clearly not only non-linear but anti-linear, the filmmaker can ignore the subject and construct a standard talking-head documentary, or, as in this case, use the documentary form's standard linearity to underscore the ideas presented. Lisbrand van Veelen plays with multiple exposures, slow motion, and other time-altering visual devices to successfully enhance Barbour's ideas in a fresh and distinctive manner without disrupting the information presented.

Highly recommended for academic studies of Physics and Philosophy but also for those who are interested in a really well-conceived and beautifully-shot documentary.