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

by Peter Galison

Hardcover, 2003

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

New York : W.W. Norton, c2003.

Description

"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, a 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 Poincare, 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." "The 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."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member fpagan

History of the theory and practice of synchronicity and simultaneity.

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LibraryThing member neurodrew

This was an extremely interesting book about the influence of the efforts to synchronize time for the purposes of longitudinal mapping and railway management on the theorization of Einstein and Poincaré. The author notes that both scientists worked in venues where electromechanical clock

synchronization was the topic of the moment, in the Bern patent office and in the French Bureau of Longitude. They settled on a procedural definition of simultaneity because of their understanding of how clocks needed to be set to reflect simultaneity. It was difficult to understand how this principle made for the elimination of the ether hypothesis, but was interesting to see Einstein’s contribution in the context of the physics of the time.

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LibraryThing member lmichet

A detailed, well-written description of the state of time-measurement technologies and measurement standardization around the beginning years of the 20th century. These are important concepts which, unfortunately, have not always struck historians and scientists as something worth such an in-depth

examination: Galison shows them here to be incredibly important, and makes that whole world come across as extremely interesting. Not overly tech-y. Good for anyone interested in Einstein, his world, or late-19th-century science and technology.

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LibraryThing member jadelson6

This book had a lot of interesting information, but ultimately I'm not sure what point the author was trying to make. Many long passages really require some knowledge of physics to fully follow. Sometimes it feels like an academic book marketed as popular non-fiction.

LibraryThing member Savagemalloy

Good information on Poincare.

LibraryThing member hcubic

When I bought this book, I didn't realize how complementary to Alder's "The Measure of All Things" it would turn out to be. I thought that Poincare's "maps" referred to were his geometric depictions of deterministic chaotic systems, which he was first to discover, and the book was going to be

largely about mathematics. Instead, it turned out to a history of the very concrete problems of synchronizing clocks for the benefit of both science and commerce (especially railroads) around the turn of the 20th century. It included some political (as well as practical) considerations, such as the location of the Prime Meridian and whether days should start at noon or midnight. Peter Galison does an excellent job of showing that Einstein's idea that motion and time are inherently relativistic did not spring full-blown from the mind of one man, but was the culmination of concepts that many - especially Poincare, but also Lorentz and Mach, were wrestling with. This very readable book is also a resource for those who wish to dig deeper, with about 30 pages of notes and 15 pages of references. I did not realize until I read this book, that Lorentz' formula predicting that objects in motion are contracted in the direction the are moving, predated Einstein's special relativity.

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LibraryThing member mbmackay

Overdone - you can see why some books end up in the remainder bins. But interesting facts about local times & how late time zones became accepted (1911 in Paris).
Read Oct 2006

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