Nothing is more mysterious and cruel.

Some reckon it to be the most powerful force in the universe, carrying everyone inexorably from birth to death, while making prisoners of us all.

But today the Oxford Mail can reveal that time may not actually exist.

For as the countdown to the Millennium begins in earnest, the Oxfordshire physicist Julian Barbour has confirmed the timely results of 36 years of research.

And he is now convinced that we are all the victims of a giant cosmic illusion that time is flowing, when the real truth is that we live in a timeless world, in a timeless universe, where there is no past or future. You may not even have noticed yet, but it may well be that we are all alive and dead in exactly the same instant.

Dr Barbour, 62, calls time on time in his new book The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe.

Although we would not recommend quoting his findings next time you are late for work, Dr Barbour has certainly come up with one of the most provocative ideas about time in years and years.

After all, if he is right, we can effectively scrap the way humanity has viewed reality for the past thousand years. Even the work of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, who shaped the way physicists still think about time and space, is challenged. Dr Barbour did a Ph.D. on Einstein's theory of gravitation at Cologne University, and it was while in the Bavarian Alps on a bright October afternoon back in 1963 that his time mission began.

He had planned to go up the southern German mountain the Watzmann but pulled out of the climbing expedition because of a splitting headache. Instead, he took the highly unusual headache-cure of contemplating an article about unifying Einstein's general theory of relativity with quantum theory.

It led to an obsession with time that continued long after he became a full-time translator of Russian. For 30 years he has lived in a farmhouse in South Newington, near Banbury, which he bought from New College, Oxford. He laughs: "I retired three years ago and this gave me the non-existent time to write my book."

He has been involved with television documentaries on physics and produced books on dynamics and Quantum Gravity, but the End of Time is the full-length account of his radical view of the world.

So what is the Big Idea? "The basic idea of my theory is that there isn't time as such," explained Dr Barbour. "There is no invisible river of time that's flowing. But there are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time, or nows. "As we live, we seem to move through a succession of nows and the question is, what are they? "

The 300- page journey takes in Einstein's two relativity theories, along with Hermann Minkowski's view of space and Erwin Schrodinger picture of quantum mechanics. We'll be kind and spare you all the quantum cosmology which can make Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time seem about as taxing as Hello magazine.

Striving to strip his theory to its bare bones he said: "We have the strong impression that you and I are sitting opposite each other, that there's a bunch of flowers on the table, that there's a chair there and things like that." Yes, with you so far. "They are there in definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see and simply keep this of idea of many different thing co-existing at once in a definite mutual relationship. The interconnected totality becomes my basic thing, a Now."

But why are we all so painfully aware of the passage of time? "It is something to do with the fact that nature is very creative. Nature does create this powerful impression."

There is a lengthy pause. "It is difference between something and nothing.We are something created out of nothing. This is ultimately the origin of why we think time is flowing." Got it? If you have, you may just make it to the strange new world of Platonic stillness that greets you in the final Chapter Life Without Time.

And you may also be interested in a talk Mr Barbour will be giving on November 17 at Oxford University Museum Lecture Theatre, Parks Road, entitled Time Does Not Exist.

It starts at 7pm. Presumably late arrivals will be welcome but then again you are probably already there.

*The End of TIme is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20).

Story date: Monday 08 November

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.