In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage, 1991), its
antihero, Billy Pilgrim, can see the whole of time at once. That Vonnegut鈥檚
story is a must for physicist Julian Barbour isn鈥檛 too surprising. Seeing all
time at once is the thesis of his own book The End of Time
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999).
Barbour is now re-reading Erwin Schr枚dinger鈥檚 Space-Time
Structure (Cambridge University Press, 1985). The first time round it 鈥済ave
me the feeling I had understood general relativity overnight鈥�, he says. He also
recommends James P. Carse鈥檚 Finite and Infinite Games (Ballantine,
1987), which interprets life as two kinds of games: finite ones you play to win,
and infinite ones that are played for the sake of playing.