The question is: what is the universe and how does it work? What is the relationship between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. “The aim is to try and find a description of the entire universe that is quantum mechanical and understand how it nevertheless it can look like the classical world that we actually see and experience.” i.e. a complete cosmology.
Quantum mechanics 1925, gave a new picture of physics. It tells us the world is not classical like we see it. It says time and space are relational as opposed to Newtonian absolute. It leads us to question is there some sort of unobservable framework of everything.
The world is relational and Barbours’ basic idea is that time as such does not exist. “But there are things that you could call instants of time or ‘Nows’. That’s my ontology of the universe- there are Nows, nothing more, nothing less.” Therefore what we consider as time or motion is really an illusion.
To help explain this Barbour uses the idea he calls Platonia. “Platonia is a special case of a very basic concept in physics called a configuration space or stratified manifold-the strata are what I call frontiers.”So if we take the structure out of the configuration space what is left is the stratified manifold, or Now. A picture of time or motion, a Now. QM tells us that until observations are made, for all these quantities, there are no definite values, but only probabilities.”
So JB is talking about a quantum cosmology that if we could understand would make it possible to make predictions about the universe which we cannot do at this time.
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