Reddit reviews The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

I think his point is that they are kind of the same thing. Some other physicists https://www.amazon.com/End-Time-Next-Revolution-Physics/dp/0195145925 have argued what I perceive to be a similar concept. Essentially time doesn't exist in the way we colloquially think about it. There is only the relative configuration of all particles and energies in the universe and that tends to move from low to high entropy (over time, for lack of a better way of putting it.).

>Time surely existed before the big bang

Though I tend to agree that time did not 'begin' with the big bang, we definitely cannot say that it surely existed before the big bang. We cannot even say with certainty that time surely exists at all. It is feasible that the so-called dimension of time is nothing more than a byproduct of our perception of motion, and some physicists (Julian Barbour comes to mind most readily) have proposed models in favor of this view.

As for what came before the big bang, the only legitimate scientific theory to turn to would be the inflationary model. It says that our universe decayed from a false vacuum state that expands at an exponential rate. The false vacuum is unstable and decays at an exponential rate as well, but in most formulations of the theory its rate of expansion is greater than its rate of decay. This implies that the false vacuum state will never decay entirely.

Our universe, in the modern inflationary theory, is a single expanding bubble of true vacuum within a much larger false vacuum state. The transition from a false vacuum to a true vacuum state is the event we term the 'big bang.' Pockets of true vacuum such as our universe are continually forming within it, sometimes collapsing again and sometimes expanding eternally at the own much more mundane rates, but overall the expanding false vacuum should approach a steady-state condition in a manner similar to the steady-state model of our own expanding universe that Fred Hoyle favored over the big bang hypothesis.

(This is paraphrased from a passage in Alan Guth's book on the subject that really stuck with me. I hope I did it justice.)

EDIT: Though that inflationary model opens the door for what Guth called an "eternally inflating" false vacuum with neither beginning nor end, and definitely implies that the false vacuum should continue to expand infinitely, there are still mathematical arguments that have been made suggesting it still must have had a definite 'beginning' at some point.

The OP had a question about Julian Barbour's "End of Time". Barbour is a physicist with an iconclastic view of the nature of spacetime. He views the perception of reality as a string of jumps from one frozen configuration of energy in spacetime to another. Each of these "time capsules" contains a complete history of its past.

However, the reply by Tom (who hasn't read the book) didn't really respond to the question. As you say, it's mostly pontificating. However, the quotes from the Buddhist sources are quite interesting, and many of them are entirely consistent with Barbour's thesis. Tom does present what amounts to a dual of Barbour's thesis: "...the way that's experienced is that you feel that you (Buddha Mind) are absolutely still in the midst of a world of absolute motion..."

In Barbour's view, you are jumping through independent worlds of absolute stillness.

All worlds energetically allowable exist. Transitions between them are those with the highest probability, and the transitions may not be unique.

I recommend Barbour's book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195145925/qid=1140375254/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9273098-8804053?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Barbour talked about 'memory' as that which creates a perception of time ...

https://www.amazon.com/End-Time-Next-Revolution-Physics/dp/0195145925

FWIW, the event-based metaphysics of Process Philosophy appear to be wholly consistent with Julian Barbour's theory of time. I suppose that both are basically relativism at its peak: there are very few absolutes left.

Fun book about this here

This is an interesting book with a different perspective

> Richard Feynman once quipped that "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, then time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist.

It's not that crazy of an argument. https://www.amazon.com/End-Time-Next-Revolution-Physics/dp/0195145925 by Justin Barbour is a physics explanation where he believes the universe evolves minute to minute, and with the result that the 'laws' and 'constants' change over time, which dove tails with the mention of those constants in the video.