The Discovery of Dynamics
by Julian B. Barbour · first published 2001
5mentions
2recommended by
2HN commenters
2015–2019first – last mentioned
100% recommend
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…more sense to me than my misunderstanding that you were saying he ran through the whole calculation from the start 70 times. I jumped to a conclusion about that part, and I'm sorry. Julian Barbour's The Discovery of Dynamics explains what Kepler did in detail (it's not the whole topic of the book, but a big chunk of it). A great book -- I didn't really appreciate Kepler before reading it. Both brilliant and very human.
on “The Slide Rule” ↗Julian Barbour's The Discovery of Dynamics goes into great detail on absolute vs. relative pre-Einstein. His The End of Time reviews the ideas at a more popular level and continues the story into the 20th C.
on “Why Understanding Space Is So Hard” ↗The Discovery of Dynamics by Julian Barbour explains Kepler's work on Mars with enough technical detail and historical context that it made me think: holy crap, Kepler was a genius, or very lucky in some of his inspirations, like…
on “Johannes Kepler was not a lone genius” ↗…pop-sci book "The End of Time" [1999] and his website http://platonia.com/ p.s. for the record, Barbour is no clown, but a serious cat -- he is also the guy that wrote "Absolute or Relative Motion / the Discovery of Dynamics" which is a bedrock treatise on Machian ideas in physics
on “Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning” ↗…: 1) Lightman's description of his hallucinationish experience at the age of nine, wherein he perceived all time in one instant [or had the sensation of doing so], reminds me of Julian Barbour ["The Discovery of Dynamics"] and his hypothesis that all spacetime exists simultaneously -- not in a Minkowski-eque 'loaf,' but in a static collection of mathematical configuration spaces, each of which represent a "now" [which…
on “My Own Personal Nothingness: From childhood hallucination to theoretical physics” ↗