The Book of Time: The Secrets of Time, How it Works and How We Measure It - Softcover

Hart-Davis, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554079055 ISBN 13: 9781554079056

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2011

Synopsis

Everything you need to know about the greatest mystery in the universe.

The Book of Time is a complete guide to one of the most important, paradoxical and truly mind-bending subjects there is. It explores every aspect of time, including how it works in the natural world and in our bodies, its significance in religion and philosophy, how we measure it and how it has been essential to our scientific understanding of the universe and everything in it.

Five sections of insightful text, color photographs and sidebars call on social and political history, science, religion, philosophy, psychology, physics, astronomy, commerce and the natural world to explore time from different perspectives, such as:

• How time has been perceived through history, and why a minute can seem like an hour or an hour can seem like a second
• How our experience of time is linked to the natural world -- the sun, the moon, the tides, the seasons
• When, why and how humans organized time into calendars, time zones and other arbitrary categories
• How humans have measured time mechanically, from primitive water clocks and sundials to atomic clocks
• How time is central to our quest to understand the universe and everything in it, including time travel and other unsolved mysteries.

Time can be billions of years or billionths of a second, but it is always passing ... Or is it? The Book of Time is a fascinating account of a universal mystery.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Hart-Davis is a scientist, author, photographer, historian and broadcaster. He is well known for his presentation of history television series in the UK, and he is the author of more than 25 books on a variety of scientific subjects.

Reviews

Is it possible to write about time, exploring its historical and scientific origins, without reference to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988)? Well, Hart-Davis gives it a try, attempting to cover a lot of the same ground Hawking does but in a much more user-friendly manner. Designed for the general reader and replete with illustrations (some pages are almost entirely taken up by visuals), the book tackles the concept of time from a variety of perspectives. The author talks about our subjective notions of time (wait time, prison time), the history of timepieces and calendars, the use of time to determine age (through radiometric dating or counting tree rings, for example), and some of the key people through history who helped to develop our modern-day concepts of time (except Hawking, that is). Glossy and slickly done—but without succumbing to superficiality—the book should appeal to readers who are approaching time as a big idea for the first time. --David Pitt

Edition details

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1554079055
• ISBN 13: 9781554079056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256