The Janus Point

The Janus Point Synopsis

"Time seems commonplace, but it is perhaps the Universe's greatest mystery. At a basic level, the laws of physics say it should be able to flow either forward or backward. And yet we -- and it seems everything in the entire Universe -- experience it in only one direction.

Most physicists think they have the answer. In The Janus Point, Julian Barbour argues that those physicists have it all wrong. The most common descriptions of time rely on the concept of entropy, a measure of disorder.

According to a common interpretation of entropy, it inevitably increases in the Universe. And that increase is what we experience as the flow of time. Barbour attacks this reasoning on several fronts.

First, he shows that their premises are all off: the concept of entropy, originally developed to describe the behavior of steam engines, is inappropriately applied to the Universe as a whole. Second, he demonstrates that it isn't disorder, but order, that i