The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time

I found this book incomprehensible - even with a strong science background. The explanations given for the Janus point and the diagrams illustrating it are not well explained and the text left me totally baffled in too many places.

I found this book hard going. The first few chapters were reasonably accessible, being a potted history of thermodynamics.The remainder of the book was an uninteresting collection of ideas concerning the nature of time, no of which made much sense to me!This book was frankly a total waste of time

there is something important here but the book is written for people with a physics degree or higher. it is poorly explained and too complex, with a heavy reliance on jargon

I have followed Barbour's work for over 20 years as a PhD physicist, but with the publication of this book I have parted company with him. His 'The End of Time' (1999) was a refreshing and eminently readable engagement with the nature and philosophy of time, and it described a way in which the problems it raises can be removed by boldly doing away with it. His new book is quite different. Although Barbour continues to pick away at approaches which might allow us to do without time and the implications of doing so, this time he has produced a book which is certainly not readable in the way his previous one was. Much of his writing is dense to the point of unintelligibility, partly because of verbosity but also through the introduction of many unexplained ideas; some of the diagrams are plain wrong (one of them is supposed to contain 'centroids' which were not there, unless I need to visit an optometrist); and his heavy handed criticism of people such as Newton, Einstein and some inbetween detracts in an unseemly way from his evangelical zeal for his ideas to my mind. And although there is a section containing copious notes to each chapter, few (if any) references to it are found within the main text.I closed the book wishing that he had listened more carefully to those who simply ask " so what"? Yes, of course we can develop a time-independent model of the universe if we wish, but at the end of the day it is valid to ask what it will achieve. Reality is nothing but the models we continue to hone within our conscious brains, and it matters little what the models are provided that they are as self-consistent as possible with what we observe, and that their predictive power is optimised. At this level I am left wondering whether Barbour has spent much of his life missing the point, I'm afraid. So he has failed to convince me of his position, and I've given up many years of my own life before coming to this view.

The author questions the prevailing view of the second law of thermodynamics and proposes a wonderful alternative. Readers will need some comfort with mathematics and physics.