"A more serene vision of the end comes from Julian Barbour, a philosopher who has collaborated with cosmologists in building a peculiar picture of reality that he calls Platonia. In Platonia, all possible configurations of matter exist. There is no passage of time, merely a set of unconnected instants, or "nows". We experience the illusion of time because many of these nows are arranged as if they had evolved through time. Barbour thinks that the possibilities in Platonia should be infinite, and so the comforting illusion of time should be infinite too."