The Clock Mirage
Our Myth of Measured Time
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- £15.99
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- £15.99
Publisher Description
A tour of clocks throughout the centuries—from the sandglass to the telomere—to reveal the physical, biological, and social nature of time
What is time? This question has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists for thousands of years. Why does time seem to speed up with age? What is its connection with memory, anticipation, and sleep cycles?
Award-winning author and mathematician Joseph Mazur provides an engaging exploration of how the understanding of time has evolved throughout human history and offers a compelling new vision, submitting that time lives within us. Our cells, he notes, have a temporal awareness, guided by environmental cues in sync with patterns of social interaction. Readers learn that, as a consequence of time’s personal nature, a forty-eight-hour journey on the Space Shuttle can feel shorter than a six-hour trip on the Soyuz capsule, that the Amondawa of the Amazon do not have ages, and that time speeds up with fever and slows down when we feel in danger.
With a narrative punctuated by personal stories of time’s effects on truck drivers, Olympic racers, prisoners, and clockmakers, Mazur’s journey is filled with fascinating insights into how our technologies, our bodies, and our attitudes can change our perceptions. Ultimately, time reveals itself as something that rides on the rhythms of our minds. The Clock Mirage presents an innovative perspective that will force us to rethink our relationship with time, and how best to use it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mazur (Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence), a Marlboro College professor emeritus of mathematics, takes readers on a thought-provoking voyage through various scientific and philosophical questions surrounding time. Ambitiously attempting to "answer the question of what time is," Mazur begins by reviewing how it has been measured throughout history, starting with the Babylonian empire, which introduced hours, and ending in the present, where sports results differing by hundredths of a second can decide winners and losers. The book then shifts to ideas about time, ranging from the Greek philosopher Zeno, who pictured a series of "discrete units, like a string of beads," through Newton's theory of "absolute" time existing independently of external factors such as human perception, to Einstein's physics-based contention that no distinction exists between past, present, and future. Mazur grounds these complex theories with "interludes" concerning how time is experienced by different people for example, prison inmates, who inhabit an "eternity of ceased time," or airline pilots, for whom flight-time mostly moves slowly, but accelerates during crises. Mazur's stimulating exploration leaves his audience with the intriguing suggestion that "time is possibly nothing more than an updating of the present, a memory of the past, and an anticipation of the future."
