He worked as a translator of Russian scientific articles and remained outside of academic institutions which provided him time to pursue his research as he desired.
[2] For some twenty years Barbour sought to reformulate physics in the spirit of Mach but found that his results have been already discovered in a different form called ADM formalism.
He acknowledges also that John Bell presented in 1980 a "quantum mechanics for cosmologists" which comes in close agreement with his conclusions, except on the point about the reality of time (p. 301).
Barbour recounts that he read a newspaper article about Dirac's work in which he was quoted as saying: "This result has led me to doubt how fundamental the four-dimensional requirement in physics is".
If a universe is composed of timeless instants in the sense of configurations of matter that do not endure, one could nonetheless have the impression that time flows, Barbour asserts.
In order to explain away the widely shared stance about past events, Barbour analyses in detail how (historical) 'records' are created.
Barbour writes that our notion of time, and our insistence on it in physical theory, has held science back, and that a scientific revolution awaits.
Julian Barbour's research has been published in academic journals and monographs, whereas The End of Time was aimed at a more general and philosophically minded public.
[6][7] Developing ideas from his book, in 2009 Barbour wrote an essay On the Nature of Time which was awarded first prize in the contest organized by FQXi.