Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time"More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre." —New York Times Book Review A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others.…Galison has unearthed fascinating material" (New York Times). Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative. Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time. |
From inside the book
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... abstract breakthrough in physics, but that the real world could have been essential for the breakthrough, is [his] great contribution. He convincingly contends that the growing insight into time coordination . . . was the result ofa ...
... abstract thought surrounded only by the productive monotony of the countryside. “There are certain occupations, even in modern society, which entail living in isolation and do not require great physical or intellectual effort. Such ...
... abstract philosophers whose goal was to enforce philosophical distinctions by fabricating hypothetical worlds rich in imaginative metaphors. Poincaré (it might be thought) had in mind such a world when he spoke of such wildly varying ...
... abstract ideas down through laboratories to the machine—shop floor and into everyday life. There are also stories that run the other way, in which the daily workings of technology are slowly refined as they shed their materiality on the ...
... abstract and the concrete, in its varie— gated scales, time coordination emerges in the volatile phase changes of critical opalescence. To dig into the records of almost any town in Europe or North America—indeed, far beyond both ...