Julian Barbour: Bottom's Dream (2016)

JULIAN BARBOUR (b. 1937) is an independent physicist. For 40 years he has been removing what he believes to be unnecessary terms from the physics toolbox. One of them is time, which, according to Barbour, is an illusion. In recent years, he has been working on a theory explaining where our sense of the passage of time and its direction comes from. We meet Barbour at his home in a village near Oxford. ABOUT THE SERIES Pioneers is one and only film project devoted to the most unorthodox contemporary thinkers who have had the courage to challenge current paradigms. The emotions of discovering and stress-testing new theories; the passion which prompts one to go against the expectations of others, against the "publish or die" model; the joys and sorrows of exploring frontiers of the known and the unknown - this is what Pioneers is about.