Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps

Empires Of Time

by Peter Louis Galison

Noted historian and author Galison examines the ways in which some of the greatest theories have arisen from the most simple technologies. Galison focuses on Einstein's use of the telegraph, clock, and train timetables, and Poincare's use of maps in order to trace how from these basic objects two thinkers were able to question whether or not time itself was an absolute or was fundamentally relative. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

Editions of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps

	ISBN 9780393020014	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher W W Norton & Co Inc	Date 2003	Price $1.00	Good
	ISBN 9780393326048	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher W W Norton & Co Inc	Date 2004	Price $8.00

Publisher Notes

"More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre."—New York Times Book Review
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. 40 b/w illustrations.