About Time: From Sun Dials to Quantum Clocks, How the Cosmos Shapes our Lives - And We Shape the Cosmos - Brossura

Frank, Adam

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1851689095 ISBN 13: 9781851689095

Casa editrice: Oneworld Publications, 2012

Riassunto

From Stonehenge to beyond the Big Bang, an exhilarating scientific exploration of how we make time Time is the grandest conception of the universe that we humans have been able to imagine – and its most intimate, the very frame of human life. In About Time, astrophysicist and award-winning writer Adam Frank tells the scientific story of this wonderful and tyrannical invention.

A Palaeolithic farmer moved through the sun-fuelled day and star-steered night in a radically different way than the Elizabethan merchants who set their pace to the clocks newly installed in their town squares. Since then, science has swept time into increasingly minute and standardized units – the industrial efficiency of ironworks’ punch clocks; the space-age precision of atomic fountains and GPS satellites; the fifteen-minute increments of Outlook’s digital revolution. And in the past decade, string-theory branes, multiverses, and “clockless” physics have begun to overturn our ideas about how the universe began – the Big Bang – in ways that will completely rewrite time and our experience of it. Weaving cosmology with day-to-day chronicles and a down-to-earth style, About Time is both dazzling and riveting as it confronts what comes next.

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Recensione

"A fascinating and comprehensive survey of how technology - from farming to railways to telegraphy to the internet - has changed our everyday concept of time. [Frank] is excellent at showing how our ideas of human and cosmic time have evolved hand-in-hand... Frank's thesis that our notions of cosmic and human time are braided together is compelling."

--"New Scientist"

In this ambitious and wonderfully expansive study, [Frank] weaves together the parallel histories of personal, lived time with cosmic time the cosmologies that we have been fashioning to explain the universe since the dawn of human civilisation. --The Guardian

L'autore

Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, in New York. The recipient of a Hubble Fellowship, he writes frequently for Discover, Astronomy, and Scientific American magazines. He is also a co-founder of NPR s top-ranking science blog, 13.7 (npr.org/13.7).

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Oneworld Publications
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1851689095
• ISBN 13: 9781851689095
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 432
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile