Theory on Time as a symptom, not the cause, coming together...

In a recent Facebook discussion, I referenced the development at http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html re: "...space-time has no time dimension..." and how it reinforces my gut-level feeling about the concept of time.  Thanks to a response by my former Lutris colleague Daryl, a few thoughts came together.

1. The folks behind this article didn't go far enough to put some visual teeth into it (for us lay people), and 
2. Once again, Julian Barbour and his work come to my rescue to explain what could be going on...

Barbour, his book called, "The End of Time" and his site http://platonia.com mean a lot to me.  In particular, he has proposed a view of existence he's dubbed Platonia. Platonia looks like a typical landscape rendering you might see in an landscape architect's office except that it represents the likelihood of events (i.e., probability).  The illusion that is created as physical space changes in sequence is the perception of time.

While looking at one of Barbour's very recent papers, I saw that he appears to be driving to a quantum theory of the universe. Or at least he's describing why the universe could be described in quantum terms. As I understand things, time prevents folks from getting to a quantum explanation... but only if you see time as a building block and not an outcome of the dynamics of things.  If you remove time from the space-time equation and replace it with the sequencing of change, then his Platonia view of things as movements powered by probability, makes a quantum thoery of space, and its coming into existence, more attainable.

So that's as far as I can run with the original article I referenced at the beginning of this post.  There's more to come now that I have a new reason for exploring Barbour's work again...

Life is so cool...