I have always enjoyed reading good popular science books, but I have likewise always found it hard to find books on subjects that interest me which are written in a way that I enjoy. Because of this although some of my favourite ever books have been science related I still don't buy this kind of bok all that often and even when I do I probably only finnish just over half of the ones that I start and the rest of them I give up halfway through. It's not that I have trouble following them, more that they just get terminally boring.

So I was very happy recently to find another one that I not only read the whole way through, but thorough enjoyed, and I decided to wrtie a review of it for hubpages. The book in question is called 'The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe' and was written by Julian Barbour.

 Essentially the topic of this book is the idea that time might not really exist. Sounds crazy, but there is a strong scientific case to be made. The common sense view is, of course, that we experience the passage of time and therefore it must exist, and this is backed up by the common scientific view of Einstein's 'space-time continuum' as being the fundamental medium in which the universe exists. But Julian Barbour uses this book to put forward his theory that time is just a part of the way that we experience the universe, and not a fundamental part of the structure of the universe itself. This really would be a pretty fundamental change to the way that we look at the world which we live in, and Barbour takes the reader through a fascinating tour of the history of scientific thinking as well as the cutting edge of quantum physics to demonstrate the validity of his theory.

One of the main things I enjoyed about reading 'The End of Time' was the feeling of being privvy to the development of an entirely new idea, and perhaps the next revolution in physics as Barbour suggests. Too often popular science books are just gently summaries of ideas that are decades or centuries old, and have nothing new or controversial to say. This book presents a promising idea which is still in development, making it the true cutting edge of physics.

I also really liked the way that Barbour re-examines and challenge old ideas and brings to light some of the assumptions which contemporary science is built on which a non-scientist (and probably many scientists as well) would not be aware of. There is also a pleasing writing method where Barbour puts questions first as an interesting philosophical point seemingly detached from the more practical concerns of physics, and when the reader has a clear picture of the concepts involved Barbour moves on the reformulate the same question in a scientific manner.

Aside from the main subject there are also some little nuggests which I found really fascinating. Early on in the book Barbour introduces the reader to a mathematical device which helps you to visualize what four dimensions would actually look like, something which is ordinarily impossible to do and which I found to be probably the most enjoyable part of the whole book.

The tone and writing style of the book is about to my tastes - reasonable accessible and not to taxing to follow, but without skipping over tough topics entirely or being patronizing. Barbour does well to reduce complex issues to a few basic principles and expressing them in a way that requires little maths and no long descriptions of experiments.

Nothing is all good, so for the sake of balance I should probably include a bit about the not so good aspects of this book as well as the best bits in my review. My personal opinion was that the first half of the book where all the questions are posed and the general issues first introduced was much more convincing than the second half. As it went on I did get a bit of a feeling that the idea being presented was more of just an alternative way  of looking at basically the same thing, and that the difference was as much in the words you choose to use as in the actual facts of the matter. But this doesn't take away from the fact that it is a great topic to think and an interesting and engaging read.

Perhaps not the best popular science book I've ever read, but definitely in the top 10. If you want something stimulating and thoughtful, or if you have an interest in physics, then you will definitely enjoy 'The End of Time'. I would give it a score of 3.5 out of 5.