steven comments on Timeless Physics - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 May 2008 09:09AM

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Comment author: steven 27 May 2008 10:48:42AM 13 points [-]

And yes, you can not only fit General Relativity into this paradigm, it actually comes out looking even more elegant than before.

Eliezer, do you realize the difference between Barbour's treatments of classical mechanics and GR? In GR, he bases everything not just on relations between matter, but on relations between matter ***and space itself*** (at least its metric structure). When he calls his theory "relational" he is engaging in wordplay. The Pooley paper I linked in yesterday's comments goes into gory philosophical detail on this.

I think some people (not including Eliezer) see that Barbour says "there is no time" and imagine that he invented the idea of a block universe (which I personally don't see any philosophical problems with). But it's everyone else who believes in block universes; Barbour's universe is an unsorted-pile-of-block-slices universe. Barbour's theory *de-unifies* space and time. Ouch!

Lee Smolin is one of the people behind relational QM, and he's a naive Popperian. To me he's the closest thing that physics has to a philosophical anti-authority.