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In Search Of Time: The Science Of A Curious Dimension (2008)

by Dan Falk(Favorite Author)

3.82 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

031237478X (ISBN13: 9780312374785)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Thomas Dunne Books

review 1: The main topic of this book is 'time.' At first it covers the cultural aspects of time which I found very interesting. The author tells about how various cultures interpreted time and used it and how that changed over the centuries. About 1/3 of the way through the book it shifted to modern physics and relativity. This section was only mildly interesting. The combination of a very complicated science combined with history of fairly dull scientists made for some pretty slow reading. One serious issue I had with this book is that it was formatted very poorly. There were missing lines or oddly spaced words and missing white space. Missing punctuation and even incomplete sentences (as in half the sentence is missing). The occasional typo and extra line I can tolerate... more. But this poor formatting happened so frequently that it became quite distracting. The editor would have seen the errors too if they had just glanced thru each page. Each mistake is very obvious.
review 2: This is a very good, recent book about just how little we really understand about the nature of time. If you've read a lot of books on the history of science, the first couple of chapters will seem a bit repetitive, as it covers ground that most books of that sort cover. It explains how we've improved our ability to measure time from the seasonal cycles and stone circles of the ancients to modern atomic clocks. There's a good discussion of Newton's views on time as compared to Einstein's. There are some chapters on how scientists think time and the universe began and another on how they're likely to end. There is good coverage of the philosophers' views on time. The author notes that the biggest puzzle is the sense we have that time "flows". That typically means that it moves with respect to something else. But what is that something else? How do you measure the rate of that flow? What does one second per second mean? He notes that modern science and philosophy tend to agree that time may not flow at all. The sense of flow may be an illusion created for us by our minds. Yet the author isn't shy about saying that there must be more to time than simply another dimension like the three physical ones. All in all, this book will make you think. It is well written and easy to read. It will probably help if you have some familiarity with physics, but I don't think it's essential. I recommend this for everyone who wonders about that "curious dimension." less

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