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Thanks for the referral to e, The Story of a Number, which I had not run into yet. I'll have to dig it up!

I'm assuming that the previous BBB (baffling book of Barbour's) was The End of Time. That is one of those books that gives you the quite spurious feeling that you have understood something really esoteric. Then you try to put it together with concepts for which you DO have a solid grasp, and you realize it was a slipperier concept than you thought.

I blog books, including Fluke and The Crytonomicon.

I read Barbour's book twice--and still did not understand it. I sent him a list of questions, which I wish had been covered by his book. Some which I recall involved music--which is tightly bound to time--and also that the concept of 'time capsules' seems circular in that it seems to require a 'meta time', or instruction pointer, which selects the time capsules in a particular sequence. This "meta time" is therefore (in my mind) precisely what we call time, only once removed.

I asked several more questions.

I got a reply: "The questions you pose are deep. I hope someday soon to have the time to begin to answer them." (pun unintended). I suspect it was from a bot; if I had suggested that time was composed of gouda cheese, I would have gotten "The questions you pose are deep..."

--Boris