Time
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
by Stephen Hawking.In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe's beginning and revealed wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these observations, as well as his own recent research, Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on wormholes and time travel, and updated the chapters throughout.
A Geography of Time: How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently
by Robert V. Levine.
Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year
by David Ewing Duncan.From the earliest recorded date (4236 B.C.), people have tried to organize their lives according to the movements of the sun, moon and stars - and have, for the most part, consistently gotten it wrong. In this volume, David Ewing Duncan takes us on an extraordinary journey through man's reckoning of time, ranging from one of the earliest calendars (a series of markings gouged into an eagle bone 13,000 years ago) to the atomic clocks of today, which measure time too well for an ever slowing Earth.
Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink
by Mark Kingwell.The year 2000 is fast approaching and a lot of people are worried about what the future holds. Mark Kingwell, uninterested in prognostication, looks instead to the present and backward to link millennial anxiety to other apocalyptic periods in history. In every previous millennial (and often centennial) finale there has been both a crisis of leadership and a penchant for cross-dressing. Conspiracy theories, distrust of government, renewed religiosity, and sex and gender flux are also symptomatic of end-times throughout recorded history. Kingwell draws on pop culture (body-piercing, angel obsession, psychics fairs, "The X-Files," "Star Trek," "The Simpsons," Pulp Fiction), current events (the Ebola virus, Waco, the Unabomber), and historical parallels (decadence in 1890s Paris, self-flagellation in 1490s Florence, the Crusades) to show how millennial anxiety threatens to extinguish our faith in ourselves.
History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders
by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Thomas Dunlap (Translator).History of the Hour presents the first sustained and reliable treatment of how mechanical clocks functioned in cities and dispels many myths associated with the clock's history. For example, Dohrn-van Rossum argues that, in their race to display the grandest clocks, monarchs and princes were more responsible than merchants for introducing clocks into urban environments. This work also questions what is generally believed regarding the clock's invention, including the role of the hour-glass, the arrival of the mechanical clock before scientific rationality, and the obscure history of the escapement, the clock's regulating mechanism.
Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins
by Alan H. Guth, Foreword by Alan P. Lightman.The classic big bang theory is great at describing what happened after the bang. Yet until recently, particle physicists and cosmologists were stuck on many questions that the big bang theory couldn't answer, including: What made the big bang BANG in the first place? If matter can be neither created nor destroyed, how could so much matter arise from nothing at all? Why can we only see a minute part of the mega-universe? In 1979, a young particle physicist named Alan Guth answered these questions and made front-page news with one of the greatest discoveries in modern cosmology: cosmic inflation. This is the compelling, first-hand account of Guth's paradigm-breaking discovery of the origins of the universe; and it is a fascinating chronicle of his dramatic struggle to justify it. Guth's startling theory states that in the billion-trillion-trillionth of a second before the big bang, there was a period of hyper-rapid "inflation" that got the big bang started. Inflation modifies our picture of only the first small fraction of a second in the history of the universe, and then it joins onto the standard big bang theory, preserving all of the successes of the older theory. But because inflation explains the bang itself, it is a much richer theory than the older versions of the big bang.
Keeping Watch: A History of American Time
by Michael O'Malley.Focusing on the period from 1820 to 1920, Keeping Watch details the far-reaching changes in American society brought about by the transition from natural to mechanical sources of time -- from farmers' almanacs and religious formulations of time to regional time zones, synchronized watches, and factory punch clocks. Michael O'Malley show how the pressures of industrialization, the emergence of the telegraph, and the spread of railroads led to a demand for uniform, consistent schedules. Chronicling particular communities' resistance to standard time and, later, daylight saving time, Keeping Watch also examines the cut-and-paste manipulation of "real time" in motion pictures. The cumulative impact of these technological changes, O'Malley argues, was momentous, creating a harsher ethic of punctuality and an unprecedented degree of labor regimentation.
Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South
by Mark M. Smith.Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a promodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners - particularly masters and their slaves - came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time.
Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalists' Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown (Revised)
by Stephen Jay Gould.In 1950 at age eight, prompted by an issue of Life magazine marking the century's midpoint, Stephen Jay Gould started thinking about the approaching turn of the millennium. In this inquiry into time and its milestones, he shares his interest and insights with his readers. The book asks and answers the three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event. First, what exactly is this concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted? How did the name for a future thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history? When does the new millennium really begin: January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001? (Although seemingly trivial, the debate over this issue tells an intriguing story about the cultural history of the twentieth century.) And why must our calendars be so complex, leading to our search for arbitrary regularity, including a fascination with millennia? This revised edition begins with a new and extensive preface on a key subject not treated in the original version.. "Ranging over a wide terrain of phenomena - from the arbitrary regularities of human calendars to the unpredictability of nature, from the vagaries of pop culture to the birth of Christ - Stephen Jay Gould holds up the mirror to our millennial passions to reveal our foibles, absurdities, and uniqueness - in other words, our humanity.
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
by David S. Landes.More than a decade after his dazzling book on the cultural, technological, and manufacturing aspects of measuring time and making clocks, David Landes has significantly expanded Revolution in Time. In a new preface and scores of updated passages, he explores new findings about medieval and early-modern time keeping, as well as contemporary hi-tech uses of the watch as mini-computer, cellular phone, and even radio receiver or television screen. While commenting on the latest research, Landes never loses his focus on the historical meaning of time and its many perceptions and uses, questions that go beyond history, that involve philosophers and possibly, theologians and literary folk as well.
The Clockwork Universe: German Clocks and Automata, 1550-1650
by Klaus Maurice, Otto Mayr.
The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang
by Marcelo Gleiser.The Dancing Universe traces mystical, philosophical,and scientific ideas about the cosmos through the past twenty-five centuries. Taking us back to the dawn of history, the author explores the legends and myths of such traditional cultures as the Hopi and the Hindu, as well as the enduring contributions of the Greeks. From the universal creation myths of ancient societies to contemporary notions of an ever-expanding universe, Marcelo Gleiser gives us a new understanding of how mysticism, religion, and science have interacted throughout the millennia. He illuminates the life and work of some of our greatest scientists, including Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein - men as renowned for their spirituality as for their scientific brilliance. By probing the ways in which scientists have unlocked the secrets of such world-changing concepts as gravity, electromagnetism, time, and space, Gleiser offers fresh perspectives on the eternal debate between science and faith. And he brings this epic drama of our origins full circle by taking us through such dazzling modern breakthroughs as relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics - in a provocative depiction of cosmic creation mysteries that harkens back to our earliest forebears.
The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report
by Timothy Ferris.Timothy Ferris begins "The Whole Shebang" with a succinct account of how we have come to know what we know about the universe. Then he explains the meaning behind the exciting new developments that have put cosmology in the headlines - including the discovery of planets orbiting stars other than our sun, glimpses through the Hubble Space Telescope of how the universe looked when it was only a fraction of its present age, and the detection of structure in relic radiation from the big bang that may hint at the mechanisms of genesis. Ferris provides a lucid, nontechnical overview of current research and a forecast of where cosmological theory is likely to go in the twenty-first century. A master analogist, he presents accessible explanations of relativity and quantum physics, "inflationary" models indicating that the universe is much larger than had been thought, and "string" theories that portray all matter as made of space. The centerpiece of "The Whole Shebang" is a visionary account of near-future science, in which light is shed on the possibility that our universe is one among many universes, each with different physical laws and differing prospects for the emergence of life.
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