Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps Empires of Time

by Galison, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780393020014
• ISBN10: 0393020010
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor for the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	9	(4)
CHAPTER 1. SYNCHRONY	13	(35)
Einsteins Times	14	(12)
A Critical Opalescence	26	(15)
Order of Argument	41	(7)
CHAPTER 2. COAL, CHAOS, AND CONVENTION	48	(36)
Coal	54	(8)
Chaos	62	(14)
Convention	76	(8)
CHAPTER 3. THE ELECTRIC WORLDMAP	84	(72)
Standards of Space and Time	84	(14)
Times, Trains, and Telegraphs	98	(9)
Marketing Time	107	(6)
Measuring Society	113	(15)
Time into Space	128	(16)
Battle over Neutrality	144	(12)
CHAPTER 4. POINCARÉ'S MAPS	156	(65)
Time, Reason, Nation	156	(6)
Decimalizing Time	162	(12)
Of Time and Maps	174	(17)
Mission to Quito	191	(7)
Etherial Time	198	(13)
A Triple Conjunction	211	(10)
CHAPTER 5. EINSTEIN'S CLOCKS	221	(73)
Materializing Time	221	(6)
Theory-Machines	227	(16)
Patent Truths	243	(20)
Clocks First	263	(8)
Radio Eiffel	271	(23)
CHAPTER 6. THE PLACE OF TIME	294	(35)
Without Mechanics	294	(9)
Two Modernisms	303	(19)
Looking Up, Looking Down	322	(7)
Notes	329	(26)
Bibliography	355	(16)
Index	371