In his first video lesson, Julian Barbour explains how, in his framework, only shape and its complexity have meaning. He explores how relationships between objects, atoms, stars, and everything in between, lay the foundations of complexity. 

In the second video lesson, you will see how Julian Barbour's complexity framework can reproduce Newton's law of gravity, found in physics textbooks. We'll then turn to the evolution of structure in the cosmos.

In the final module, Barbour delves into the Big Bang, causality, how the present and future relate to the past, and he rethinks the arrow of time.

Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist and former visiting professor in physics at the University of Oxford, UK, who has spent more than 50 years researching quantum gravity and the history of science. He received his PhD degree on the foundations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity from the University of Cologne in 1968, and has written three books: The Discovery of Dynamics, covering the period from Greek antiquity to Newton's discoveries, The End of Time, in which he argues that time is an illusion, and The Janus Point, which offers a new perspective on time. In 2008, he received a research grant from the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI to develop his framework of shape dynamics; he has been an active member of FQxI's research community, ever since.