The end of time: New perspectives of self-identification for man

Abstract

At any angle it is constituted in our Tradition, or in addition to chronos, as aion, kairos, and eniautos, the concept of time has been (and is) the fundamental reason of our self-identification, self-comprehension, and self-narrating. This paper, through the reconstruction of some of milestones of Western Philosophy until post-Einstein physics, tries to analyze Julian Barbour’s proposal. He argues that the holy grail of physicists—the unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics—may well spell the end of time. The idea of the discontinuity of time proposed by Barbour attempts to explain in a theoretical context a universe composed of many points he calls ‘Now’.