Skip to main content

Introducing Time – Craig Callender & Ralph Edney *****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (about 80 books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Many of the pages feature large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise a point.
If you scan the shelves on popular science it is surprisingly difficult to find a book on time, which is strange when you consider what a fundamental part of the physical world time is. Yes, you’ll discover books on time-keeping, on clocks and the measurement of time. Equally you’ll find books covering subjective time. Our personal experience of time, as opposed to time as a physical entity. But there’s very little on ‘real’ time.
It was a very pleasant surprise, then, to discover this entry in the ‘Introducing…’ series is a little cracker. Not only is it one of the better written members of the series, it really does explore the nature of time, far beyond a quick dip into St Augustine and Aristotle (even though these two worthies do get a look in).
There’s a powerful exploration of the difference between block time and the unfolding now – or as Callendar puts it, the detensers and the tensers – and plenty of reflections on the possibilities for time travel emerging from a wide range of physical concepts. Relativity, of course, gets a look in, as do the various paradoxes of time travel and some teasing possibilities that would emerge if, for example, spacetime were a Mobius strip.
While occasionally, and almost inevitably with what can be quite an esoteric subject, the author came close to losing me, most of the time he manages to make these mind boggling concepts surprisingly approachable. I wish I could say this was down to the illustrations, but to be honest I didn’t take them in all that much (though they are very well drawn). I was so engrossed with the text, I ignored much of the illustration (which is less obtrusive and more separate than in many of the series). Just occasionally you have to read the text in the illustration, which carries the narrative forward – this I found a bit irritating, as I had usually skipped it, realized it was missing and had to go back.
There’s just one point that seemed entirely wrong. When describing the use of the special relativity twins paradox to travel in time, the characters in the drawing say ‘It doesn’t bring us back to the past or forward to the future… it just enables our clock, at best, to age slower than clocks elsewhere.’ It’s certainly true that the twins paradox doesn’t enable travel into the past. But it does enable travel into the future. You might, for example, leave Earth in 2050, travel for 5 years (as far as you are concerned), and arrive back in 2100. In what way have you not travelled 45 years into the future? This just doesn’t make sense.
That apart, though, this is not only an excellent addition to the series but the best book on time I’ve read. Inevitably it’s very condensed to fit the format, but that’s somehow not inappropriate given the subject. Nice one.
*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

Paperback:  
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more