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"Synchrony and Simultaneity": A Review of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, by Peter Galison. Reviewed by Hasok Chang. American Scientist, November-December 2003.
This positive review describes the latest book by a renowned historian of science who, as the reviewer puts it, "provides a unique and enlightening view on the origin of time as we know it in the modern age." One of the indelible popular images in the history of science is that of Albert Einstein revolutionizing physics while working an uninspiring day job as a Swiss patent clerk. This book adds a new dimension to this popular image: "Not only did Einstein actually enjoy his patent-office job," the reviewer writes, "but the work there taught him about the technologies of electromagnetic clock-coordination, which was one of the chief preoccupations of the engineering world in the half-century following 1860." It seems that special relativity grew out of this hands-on work as much as out of Einstein's powerful imagination. The book also discusses Poncaré's practical concerns in his work with the French Bureau of Longitudes and his and his collaborator's efforts to battle Britain's establishment of Greenwich as the prime meridian. The review is accompanied by a photo of a "decimal clock," a 1793 vestige from the French attempt to introduce a decimal system of timekeeping. The caption notes that mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace "was one of the few scientists to take up the new system."
See also:
"Clockwork Science": Review of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps:
Empires of Time, by Peter Galison. Reviewed by Freeman Dyson. The New York Review of Books, 6
November 2003, pages 42-44; and
"Seeking Simultaneity": Review of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps
by Peter Galison. Reviewed by M. Norton Miles.
Science, 19 December 2003,
page 2072.
--- Allyn Jackson
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