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Product Details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1 edition (January 5, 2010)
Join Dan Falk for a bus tour of all the major tourist spots of science history where time played an important role. After exploring the history of time and its measurement, you'll enjoy the impressive views of all the big names (Newton, Einstein etc), and stop to chat with some contemporary players in the scientific fields that play with notions of time.
The book's weakness is the same as that of the science it surveys: we spend a lot of time exploring what we do with time as a concept (its epistemologies) but don't really explore what time really is (ontologically or phenomenologically). There are some brief and dismissive philosophical side-bars but it's clear the author is out of his depth when wrestling with the philosophy behind the science and the interpretation of the science. For example, he claims the measurability of time dilation is proof of time travel to the future, which it isn't - it's just slower travel through now; his juvenile single-sentence dismissal of "presentism" is indicative of the philosophical rigour.
None of this takes away from the enjoyable and highly readable text and if you don't want to go deep into time, this is a tour worth taking.
I must mention the deplorable state of the typesetting and layout, which frequently justifies single words over whole lines and in some places actually cuts off the footnotes mid sentence. Either the publisher's software is buggy or they don't know how to use it, which makes for a visually bumpy ride .
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Way back in 1995 I read a fascinating book by Paul Davies called `About Time'. What makes the topic of time so interesting is that most people believe that they intuitively understand time and yet our perception and reality can be at odds. Unlike most things in nature science cannot stand outside of time and study it. We also have a very limited understanding of time based on that fact that we have no personal experiences with the very fast, the very distant and the very massive. This is why from our perspective Newtonian physics, which fundamentally misinterprets time, works perfectly fine in everyday life. My expectation for the book was to read more about the science of time possibly updated with research done within the past decade and a half. I don't think my expectation was unreasonable given the subtitle of the book, `The SCIENCE of a curious DIMENSION'. Note the prominence of the word `science'. To say I was disappointed would be a great understatement.
The first half of the book is about the history of timekeeping going back thousands of years. It's mildly interesting but certainly not why I purchased the book. About halfway through we finally get to Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the book briefly became intriguing although it never expands on ideas I've already read in many other books. In fact the second half of the book was sort of a primer on modern physics in general with the author touching on the big bang, black holes, dark matter, the smoothness of background radiation, grand unified theory, string theory (including m-branes), paradoxes of time travel and so on and so forth. What he doesn't do is ever delve into any one topic long enough to do anything more than scratch the surface.Read more ›
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
In this book, Mr. Falk gives the reader a broad survey of current and ancient thinking about a question that has vexed humanity since the beginning: what is the nature of time? One of the difficulties with the question is that we don't even have a universally accepted definition of what time actually "is". For most of recorded history the topic of time was the domain of philosphy and physics. Mr. Falk walks the reader through the main philosophical theories about time and then shows how Isaac Newton decisively brought time into the grip of physical science. A couple of centuries later, Einstein overthrew some of our misconceptions about time and showed that time, like space, is not absolute but relative. Mr. Falk explains some of the key conclusions of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity in a way that a general reader can easily follow. In more recent times, Mr. Falk informs us, psychologists and cognitive scientists have begun tackling the subject of time as they systematically probe the nature of the human mind. By the way, the mind and the nature of consciousness is another 'little' subject that will continue to defy us for the forseable future. In addition to the philosophical and scientific theories about time, the book also covers cultural and sociological aspects of how humans deal with time. The language and diction of book are of high caliber.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
OK, I'll be honest - I'm an Amazon lurker. I've used the site for years but have never actually written a review before. But I was so galled to see that this gem of a book didn't have *any* reviews that I felt compelled to rate it and provide more information about it. tl;dr: If you have any interest in better understanding "time", buy this book NOW.
Some background: I discovered "In Search of Time" in the science section of a local bookstore. I had been pondering some philosophical questions related to the idea of time (and I have more than a passing interest in various time-travel sci-fi material), and was looking for a title that would help me better understand the concept of time in general, as well as some of the thorny issues raised when one begins to think deeply about it. I was after more of a general overview on questions related to time, how various people answered them, etc. I was looking in the science section as I was after more than just a philosophical treatment and knew how much physics and time are intermingled. I have a graduate degree in math and had taken physics courses, so I was familiar with relativity, Brian Greene, etc., but still wanted to dig more into that thing we call "time". As I browsed the available titles, I heard an announcement that the store would be closing soon (it was late in the evening)... I had picked up "In Search of Time" and it looked interesting, so I decided to give it a shot and bought it.
I am so glad that I did. A quote on the cover from one review says "Falk's book is what Hawking's Brief History of Time should have been." An audacious claim, but not altogether unjustified.Read more ›
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This item: In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time
