Why Time Flies
A Mostly Scientific Investigation
-
- $17.99
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
‘[Why Time Flies] opens up a well of fascinating queries and gives us a glimpse of what has become an ever more deepening mystery for humans: the nature of time.’ New York Times Book Review
For more than two thousand years the world’s great minds have argued about the true essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Is it continuous or discrete? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits like sand trickling through an hourglass? And most immediately, what is the present?
What is time, exactly? Why does it seem to slow down when we’re bored and speed by as we get older? How and why does time fly?
In this witty and meditative exploration, Alan Burdick takes readers on a personal quest to understand how and why we perceive time the way we do. He visits the most accurate clock in the world (which exists only on paper); discovers that ‘now’ actually happened a split-second ago; finds a twenty-fifth hour in the day; lives in the Arctic to lose all sense of time; and, for one fleeting moment in a neuroscientist’s lab, even makes time go backwards. Why Time Flies is a vivid and intimate examination of the clocks that tick inside us all.
Alan Burdick is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to its science-and-tech blog. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, Discover, Best American Science and Nature Writing.
‘An insightful meditation on the curious nature of time....A highly illuminating intellectual investigation.’ Kirkus Reviews
‘[Burdick] is an engaging writer guided by curiosity.’ Saturday Paper
‘A fascinating premise that we can all relate to…A well-researched volume [with] some fascinating insights.’ AU Review
‘In his lucid, thoughtful, and beautifully written inquiry about time…Burdick offers nothing less than a new way of reconsidering what it means to be human.’ Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
‘Alan Burdick offers a fascinating and searching account of how we perceive time’s passage. It will change the way you think about the past, and also the present.’ Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
‘Alan Burdick turns an obsession with the nature of time into a thrilling quest—one that brilliantly illuminates a subject that haunts us all. Time may fly by but at least while reading these pages it is never wasted.’ David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
‘Brilliant, brain-boggling.’ New Daily
‘To readers of the New Yorker, Burdick’s style is instantly recognisable: informal, informed and indefatigably researched…His wit and humour keep the narrative rolling with wry observations.’ New Zealand Herald
‘Time for Burdick is ultimately an adventure of discovery. His wealth of deeply researched and detailed but humorous stories serves to raise our curiosity…Make time to read his fascinating and illuminating book.’ Toowoomba Chronicle
‘[Burdick] is a lucid and well-informed commentator on scientific matters. Here, he takes us by the wrist and leads us through the maze of time. We could not ask for a better guide.’ Stuff NZ
‘Alan Burdick takes a new, interesting and mindful approach to the topic in an effort to understand what we know about that often intangible concept we call time.’ Australian Geographic
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Burdick (Out of Eden), a staff writer at the New Yorker, brings a casual, evocative style to his inquiry into the nature of time. He surveys historical conceptions of and experiments about the phenomenon, recounts his own chatty visits to the laboratories of experts who've devoted their life's work to the subject, travels to the places where aspects of time manifest dramatically, analyzes how animals and human babies view the passage of time, and draws connections to the ephemera of his own experience. Burdick relates the scientific elements here with unusual clarity, making sure the book is not merely a collection of intellectually stimulating physiological and psychological trivia. Coffee-table conversationalists will appreciate his discussions of such topics as the methods for synchronizing world time, exactly how long "now" is, and how circadian rhythms work across nature. Burdick's orientation is as philosophical as it is scientific, and he provides thoughtful background on such themes as time as four-dimensional geometry and the question "Are we born into time or is time born into us?" Returning regularly to the idea that time is a property of the mind that does not exist without a subject to perceive it, Burdick places his readers in the centers of their temporal universes.