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Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time

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In this book, Peter Galison attempts to show that scientists and mathematicians, no matter how brilliant, do not work in a vacuum. The focus is more on Henri Poincare than Albert Einstein, although Einstein is certainly not slighted. It's just that Mr. Galison feels, at least as far as the general public is concerned, Poincare has been "slighted,"....and this book, in part, is an attempt to redress the situation. It is easy to think of mathematicians and physicists as being disconnected from the "real world." Mr. Galison wants to show us, however, that they are influenced heavily by their colleagues in the scientific community and, more generally, by the culture they are part of. Thus, Poincare (president of the French Bureau of Longitude) was a creature of his times: he was "formed" by his education at the Ecole Polytechnique, with its emphasis on combining theory with practice. He was a man who "networked," and constantly exchanged ideas with fellow mathematicians and scientists. As a Frenchman, he shared in the humiliation of the French defeat at the hands of the Prussians in the war of 1870. Thus, it was important for France to lead the way in the longitudinal mapping of the planet (which required the synchronization of clocks across great distances). This longitudinal mapping was important for war and peace (for moving armies and navies...and oceangoing commerce). Synchronized clocks, even apart from their relationship to longitude, were also important for other reasons- such as for regulating railroad schedules. Mr. Galison's point: time was in the air and, since the outlook was global, there was an understanding that time was relative rather than absolute. Mr. Galison is not trying to say that Poincare "invented" the Theory of Special Relativity. What he is trying to say is that the obsession with time was "in the ether." Einstein, in Switzerland, was not immune to these influences. Which brings us to, for me, anyway, the most interesting part of the book - the relationship between Einstein's work at the Bern patent office (both the specifics and the methodology). People were constantly trying to come up with better ways of synchronizing clocks, and Einstein saw many of these patent applications. Also, it was his job to evaluate patent applications. The patent application (amongst other things) has to show that you've come up with something original, and it also has to show clearly how the invention will work. Mr. Galison makes a convincing argument that Einstein's job, at the very least, kept him thinking about the synchronization (and, hence, the relativity) of time. Even more interesting, in his 1905 paper on Special Relativity, Einstein did not use footnotes or make references to other scientists. Mr. Galison speculates: was this arrogance on Einstein's part, or was he influenced by his work at the patent office? In other words, it wouldn't help your case if, in a patent application, you showed how your idea was based on other ideas. You needed to show you had come up with something new. Regarding patents and practicality, Einstein, in his 1905 paper, included "thought experiments" to show how his theory should function in the real world. Let me stress that Mr. Galison is not trying to downplay Einstein's brilliance. He is trying to show that everyone is affected by what is going on around them - no exceptions granted. Mr. Galison is also keen to show us the differences in the working methods of the two men. Einstein was a bit of a rebel - he enjoyed overturning the apple cart. Hence he was not reluctant to discard theories he had no use for. Poincare believed more in building on what came before him, and in reaching consensus. According to Mr. Galison, this makes Poincare appear conservative- but this isn't so. He was a brilliant man, but just not as radical as Einstein. To paraphrase an analogy the author uses, Pablo Picasso may not have been Jackson Pollock, but this didn't make Picasso conservative. One caveat concerning the book: it is certainly not for the beginner. Mr. Galison's explanations and diagrams are clear and concise. However, since I don't have much of a background in math, I found the sections on Poincare to be tough-sledding. I have previously done some reading on relativity, so I found the sections on Einstein to be a bit easier to get through. So, just be aware that the author is expecting that you have some familiarity with what he is talking about. That caveat aside, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

With a life long fascination toward those things mathematical, scientific and historical, I approached Peter Galison's book with happy expectations. Investing three days in its reading and finding much new material of interest, I have no problem with Mr. Galison's credentials as a scholar and historian of science.

Sadly, what is admirable regarding his book has been seriously compromised by Galison's maddening redundancy and deluge of verbosity. How many times need he remind us that Poincare was trained at the Ecole Polytechnique and headed the Bureau des Longitudes, or that Einstein was more than just a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office where he received valuable experience regarding clock synchronization?

Though some reviewers found the book overly technical, I would have appreciated more detail in the thoughts and experiments of the two protagonists, as well as more information than was given regarding the contributions and lives of other significant players such as Minkowski, Maxwell, Lorentz and Mach.

While the notes, bibliography, and Galison's insights attest to his dedication and knowledge, the 328 pages of text, for what they contained, could easily have been reduced by 75 to 100 pages, if not more. I can only wonder if the author was simply churning out text to meet the obligations of a book contract. Besides being personally frustrating --because I truly appreciated much of what he presented-- this excess, as I forced myself to read through the final pages, became laughable. Before he publishes his next book, I strongly suggest Gallison take a freshman course in journalism at his university, Harvard, so that he might be more sensitive to the literary advantages of trimming the fat!

Einstein and Poincare were two inventors who made parallel attempts to harness time and helped create the science of relativity; but no single study has previously drawn such close links between the efforts of the young German physicist Einstein and the mathematician Poincare. Peter Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps expertly examines the achievements and details of each, and in doing so incorporats new information drawn from forgotten patents, rare photos, and archived materials to chart a little-known but inherently fascinating race toward a theory of time. An important addition to school and community library History of Science collections, Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps is an exciting, intriguing and enthusiastically recommended coverage.

It is so easy to tell when one thing happens simultaneously with another. You just see them both happen at the same time, simple. But let's say you are very sensitive to the speed of light, so sensitive that you can tell the difference in the interval between light coming from five miles away or ten miles away. Imagine yourself on a mountain and you see simultaneous lightning strikes on mountains that are both five miles away from you. You see the light from both at the same time; simultaneity is easy to spot. But now imagine the lightning hits simultaneously a mountain five miles away and another ten miles away. You now see one lightning strike well before the other. Where did the simultaneity go? It has suddenly gotten complicated and elusive. _Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time_ by Peter Galison (Norton) is the story of what happened when two quite different thinkers contemplated the problem of simultaneity, and also of how people have done their best to promulgate an increasingly accurate time within their cities, countries, and the world.

Quite famously, the young Albert Einstein was a mere minor bureaucrat in the Patent Office in Berne starting in 1902. Galison shows that time synchronization had to be on his mind because some of the patents he examined were for gadgets to help keep clocks in synchrony. Synchronized clocks were becoming increasingly important, for keeping trains from hitting each other, and then to keep microseconds from interfering with mapmaking. Poincaré was President of France's Board of Longitude, and synchrony was vital to him as he sent time-signals to cartographers in, say, South America. If the sent time was off due to cable delivery, the map might be half a kilometer in error. Poincaré's contemplations of synchrony led him to a mathematical concept of relativity that preceded Einstein's. Poincaré, however, didn't take the leap to eliminate the ether as Einstein did.

This is not a book to explain relativity. It is a broad history of modern timekeeping, and since Poincaré is a relatively obscure figure, his polymathic additions to different fields of knowledge will be astonishing to most readers. It especially concentrates on how there was a complex historic interplay between theories and mechanisms, abstract and concrete inventions, that brought our current understanding of relativity about. It is a stimulating work, sometimes not easy to get through and certainly not easy to summarize. But there are intriguing insights about the two personalities involved, and fascinating explanations of the give and take in mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and physics eventually that allowed relativity to be understood.

Mr. Malvin's criticisms are dead on. The book could have been shorter and tighter, and the cute word play is distracting (e.g., ". . . George Airy could not be so breezily toppled.").

That said, the book was very interesting. I had not been familiar with the history. I had believed Einstein pulled an extremely radical notion out his hat. The book convincingly demonstrated why the theory of special relativity was ripe for Einstein's discovery at the turn of the 20th century. Also, I was not familiar with Poincare, who apparently was tantalizingly close to beating Einstein to the punch.

Unlike some other reviewers, I did not think the book was overly technical. For people with no physics background (like me), the technical issues might have been further explained and explored.

Primitive humans had only two times, light time for living and dark time for hiding. The development of agriculture demanded the refinement of a seasonal calendar so that the crops could be planted at the appropriate time. This was only the first step in the simultaneous development of more accurate clocks and advanced technology. The dangers of navigating the seas required the precise computation of longitude, which required an accurate clock and the determination of a point of zero longitude. A growing network of railroad tracks with multiple trains using them required that the trains have highly synchronized timepieces. A difference of less than a minute could lead to a collision and there was several crashes due to such differences.
These problems led to an international effort to establish a universal time and an international agreement as to the placement of zero longitude. Henri Poincare was a leader of the movement to establish these standards and in this book the historical background explaining why they were needed is given. There were also many social and political forces that required many compromises between those who were pushing their nationalist agenda. The story of how the logical solution of zero longitude was set at Greenwich is a story of how international agreements can be reached.
The most interesting story is how the requirements of synchronized time led Albert Einstein to his theory of relativity. His primary conclusion was that it is impossible. The finite and fixed speed of light meant that synchronization could only be done within the bounds of that restriction. It is amazing to consider all of the consequences of this simple premise and those consequences are explained in detail. The most fascinating statistic in the book deals with the need for a relativistic correction in the Global Positions System (GPS) signals. This satellite system allows for the pinpointing of a position on the earth within a few feet. If no relativistic corrections were made, then after only a single day, the error in the GPS system would be on the order of six miles.
This is a book on a very specific and necessary area of technological advancement. One measure of the improvement in technology is the precision of our clocks and from this book, you can see why it is important and in many ways necessary. The primary downside is the last chapter, where about twenty pages could have been deleted without any loss of critical information.

When I saw the Amazon reviews and ratings for this book, I hesitated to buy it. But after examining the reviews more carefully, I noticed that several of the reviewers giving the book a low rating did admit to the fact that the book contained interesting information. So, after browsing it yet again, I bought it and read it. I was not disappointed. The author's writing style is very cultured but, at times, awkward; so, for me, it is not what I would call a quick read. There is much on Poincare, less on Einstein, much on simultaneity, some physics history and much on time synchronization, from all angles: political, cultural, scientific and technological. Although the book does seem to wander from one subject to a seemingly unrelated other, from one person to another and from one continent to another, everything eventually comes together. I enjoyed this book and recommend it. It should be read while keeping an open mind.

True, the title of the book is a bit decieving, since it does not specifially talk much about Poincare's maps..and keeps the audience wondering and wanting more in that section. Similarly this is not a book to learn much about Relativity either. However, I think a book like such was much awaited. For the first time someone has done the folowing:

1. Taken the mystic out of Einstien, and showed him a man of his time.
2. Made us understand that why Einstien thought so persistently about simultaniety.
3. How the Physicist Einstien was also a product of his training at the Patent office. This is an angle which no one touched before.

The book is unique, and should be read by whoever is a good student of Einstien and his theories. As it does bring him out of the clouds, and puts him back on earth, and makes him human again. Which is a must have.

Writing about science for laypersons is a tricky business, especially with regard to the scientific accuracy of the exposition and the human dimension of the characters. In the first instance, the author must choose between a superficial approach, full of analogies, fit for beginners, at the risk of boring the initiated, and a more elaborate treatment, intended for someone already familiar with the subject, that will probably scare the uninitiated. As to the characters, the author may reduce the scientists to a secondary role and concentrate on the results of research or fill the narrative with personal details about the people involved. The first choice will please the scientific-minded, while the second can make the reading more attractive to the humanists.
My main criticism of the book Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time is that the author does not make up his mind about the two points mentioned above. The long expositions about relativity and chaos do not bring any new contribution to the subject; the best popular books on relativity were written by Einstein himself, while chaos theory is brilliant reviewed by James Gleick in his best-selling Chaos: Making a New Science. At the same time, the wording is sometimes confusing for beginners. As to the biographical aspect of the work, several personal anecdotes on Einstein's and Poincaré 's lives are included (some utterly irrelevant), but the book does not dwell on the rich personalities of these two giants of science.
In short: trying to please everybody, the author wrote a book that possibly will please nobody

The goal of this book is to provide the context for a momentous shift in physics; the change from Newtonian conceptions of absolute time to the modern theories of relativity/spacetime. For Galison, the key seems to be the shift from an abstract notion of absolute time to an operationally defined definition of time based on signalling between clocks. This change is part of the enormous change from classical physics to modern physics that occured following the turn of the past century. Galison's aim is to show the broad connections between this event and a series of parallel phenomena in contemporary science, technology, and even politics. Galison concentrates on 2 key figures; the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, and his younger and even greater contemporary Albert Einstein. Galison shows very well that issues of time, defintions of universal and local time, and methods of assessing time were broadly important in the late 19th century. The expansion of European empires, the huge increase in international maritime trade, and the development of dense railway networks required more accurate standardization of time and correlation of times at different parts of the globe and within different countries. These practical issues brought questions about defining time and debates over methods of defining time to the fore. Much of this debate required attention to setting conventions for time measurement. At the same time, major issues of physics and philosophy had started to undermine the historic view of absolute time. Galison shows that both Einstein and Poincare were quite deeply embedded in these practical issues. Poincare as a major figure in French science dealt directly with many of these issues on both a national and international scale. Einstein, through his work in the Swiss patent office directly encountered many of the emerging technologies related to time measurement. Both were interested not only in physics related to time but also to philosophical speculation related to time. Einstein would ultimately push physics across the threshold of a truly relativistic account of time though Poincare came very close. While some of this book is redundant, Galison certainly presents a convincing case for the interconnection between the physics of Einstein and Poincare, and the other time related concerns of this period.
While Galison doesn't address this issue specifically, his account is relevant to the famous account of scientific change developed by Thomas Kuhn. It is hard to see the decisive paradigm shift described by Kuhn in Galison's account. Indeed, much of this account seems to vindicate the conclusion of the historian of physics Kragh (Quantum Generations) who sees late 19th century physics as quite dynamic and considerable continuity between the physics of the late 19th century and what came after.