What is happening to perceptions of time, durability and reality in the 21th century? This anthology explores a diversity of uncommon insights about time, as seen from our historical and geographical standpoint. It sheds new light on how construction, perception and regulation of time influences a person’s whole being in the world, collectively and individually, in the short and long run, fro…
Surveying the major facts, concepts, theories, and speculations that infuse our present comprehension of time, the Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, & Culture explores the contributions of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and creative artists from ancient times to the present. By drawing together into one collection ideas from scholars around the globe and in a wide ran…
n this chapterIexploreGraeco-Roman techniques of, and attitudes towards,time measurement,from the twin perspectivesofeverydaylife andmedicine. Isurvey literary and archaeological evidence for the twomain available technol-ogies of timemeasurement,sundials and water-clocks, and consider what thisevidence tells us about their differential accessibility and context of use, andabout Roman attitudes…
Gleick's story begins at the turn of the 20th century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation: The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizat…
This volume explores a wide-range of puzzles such as the grandfather paradox, the bootstrapping paradox, and the twin paradox of special relativity. Ryan Wasserman draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology. Paradoxes of Time Travel is written in an accessible style, and fil…
Why do we measure time in the way that we do? Why is a week seven days long? At what point did minutes and seconds come into being? Why are some calendars lunar and some solar? The organization of time into hours, days, months, and years seems immutable and universal, but is actually far more artificial than most people realize. For example, the French Revolution resulted in a restructuring of…
My class was scheduled from ten until noon. Many students came late. Several arrived after 10:30. A few showed up closer to eleven. Two came after that. All of the latecomers wore the relaxed smiles I later came to enjoy. Each one greeted me, and although a few apologized briefly, none seemed terribly concerned about being late. They assumed that I understood. That Brazilians would arrive late …
This transdisciplinary volume investigates the ways in which people and organisations deal with the overflow of information, goods or choices. It explores two main themes: the emergence of overflows and the management of overflows, in the sense of either controlling or coping with them. Individual chapters show the management of overflows taking place in various social settings, periods and pol…
At their first public demonstration in Paris in 1839, photographs seemed nothing short of miraculous in their ability to record a mirror image of actuality. From the moment its inventors promoted the camera's usefulness for documenting Egyptian hieroglyphs, photography has played a decisive role in the interpretation of antiquity. Early photographers focused their lenses on marble-pillared temp…