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

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, 2003 - 389 pages
A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others....Galison has unearthed fascinating material (New York Times).

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, an 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 Poincaré, 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.

Esteemed 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.
 

Contents

Acknowledgments
9
SYNCHRONY
13
Einsteins Times
14
A Critical Opalescence
26
Order of Argument
41
COAL CHAOS AND CONVENTION
48
Coal
54
Chaos
62
Of Time and Maps
174
Mission to Quito
191
Etherial Time
198
A Triple Conjunction
211
EINSTEINS CLOCKS
221
TheoryMachines
227
Patent Truths
243
Clocks First
263

Convention
76
THE ELECTRIC WORLDMAP
84
Times Trains and Telegraphs
98
Marketing Time
107
Measuring Society
113
Time into Space
128
Battle over Neutrality
144
POINCARES MAPS
156
Decimalizing Time
162
Radio Eiffel
271
THE PLACE OF TIME
294
Two Modernisms
303
Looking Up Looking Down
322
Notes
329
Bibliography
355
Index
371
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor for the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Max Planck Prize, as well as the Pfizer Prize for the Best Book in the History of Science for Image and Logic.

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