Theoretical physicist JULIAN BARBOUR has worked on foundational issues in physics for nearly fifty years, specializing in the study of time and motion. He is emeritus visiting professor in physics at the University of Oxford.
Barbour's first paper, published in Nature, led to six years of collaboration with the well-known Italian theorist Bruno Bertotti, and culminated in 1982 with a joint paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A. This is now widely regarded as a seminal paper on the interconnection of local dynamics with the Universe at large. It was the stimulus to the development of shape dynamics, which is a radical reinterpretation of Einstein's general theory of relativity that lays bare its core dynamical structure. The insights that led to new insights into the origin of the arrows of time derived directly from the creation of shape dynamics.
He is the author of Absolute or Relative Motion? (reprinted in paperback The Discovery of Dynamics), The End of Time, and The Janus Point.
