Now that I have your attention, this mainly is to ascribe the intriguing subject of time, by physicist Julian Barbour.

Discover Magazine, December 2000 issue, cover story is "Does time really exist?". This in recognition of the spreading popularity of Barbours' book "The End of Time", in which he presents his case for a universe where time, despite all appearances to the contrary, plays no role.

Barbour had obtained his doctorate in physics from the University of Cologne in 1968, and he is now 63 years old.

To give a small taste of what Barbour is theorizing, the following is a short quote from the above said magazine.

"Every possible configuration of the universe, past, present, and future, exists separately and eternally. We don't live in a single universe that passes through time. Instead, we -or many slightly different versions of ourselves -simultaneously inhabit a multitude of statuc, everlasting tableaux that include everything in the universe at any given moment."

If you like numbers and equations that try to make the preceding theoretically possible, is currently being worked on between Julian Barbour and Niall O' Murchadha, an Irish physicist. A reference to the type of equations being utilized are based from those of Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler (known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation), which in turn is based on the Schrodinger equation.

-Tchzarmok