By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

This is a strange mixed bag of a book that starts with three parts that take sensible steps from leaving Earth, through 'touring the Sun's backyard' to 'into outer space', but then makes an odd leap in the final section 'to infinity and beyond' to explore the extremely hypothetical field of time travel - great fun as a topic, but hardly much to do with the rest of the book. Overall, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker (something of a name overload) give us the print equivalent of a TV science show (perhaps not entirely surprisingly given Tyson has done a number of these and Walker is a TV producer and podcast writer). It's mostly presented at the superficial level of such shows (with a certain amount of Brian-Cox-on-a-mountain-style flowery prose), which kind of misses the point of a popular science book that you can go beyond the superficial. Occasionally we do get some more detail, but it's often not presented in a particularly approachable ...

Time travel, as Brian Clegg reminds us in his first chapter (sorry, first lesson), was a popular fictional subject long before it found its way into mainstream science. That it did is largely thanks to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is a notoriously abstruse area of modern physics. So it’s no easy thing to produce a popular-level book that really gets to grips with the serious science of time travel, and it’s to Clegg’s credit that he achieved just that in his brilliant How to Build a Time Machine (aka Build Your Own Time Machine)  ten years ago. This new book is rather different, approaching the same subject in an altogether more lightweight way. Appropriately enough, it’s part of a series called ‘Pocket Einstein’. But the fact that Einstein keeps cropping up in it  – with topics like quantum entanglement and Einstein-Rosen bridges as well as relativity – is largely coincidence. Other titles in the same series include Artificial Intelligence and Renewable Ene...

There's good news and bad news. The good news is that The Order of Time does what A Brief History of Time seemed to promise but didn't cover: it attempts to explore what time itself is. The bad news is that Carlo Rovelli does this in such a flowery and hand-waving fashion that, though the reader may get a brief feeling that they understand what he's writing about, any understanding rapidly disappears like the scent of a passing flower (the style is catching). It doesn't help either that the book is in translation so some scientific terms are mangled, or that Rovelli has a habit of self-contradiction. Time and again (pun intended) he tells us time doesn't exist, then makes use of it. For example, at one point within a page of telling us of time's absence Rovelli writes of events that have duration and a 'when' - both meaningless terms without time. At one point he speaks of a world without time, elsewhere he says 'Time and space are real phenom...

This book has the feel of two different books that have been shoehorned together - which isn't entirely surprising, as the author tells us that he has combined a simplified version of his earlier title Time Machines with material on time travel in philosophy and science fiction. I expected to find the science fiction part more interesting, as I've read far too many books on the physics of time travel, but it was actually the other way round. By reducing the maths content of his earlier book, Paul Nahin has made the physics of time travel bits significantly more approachable (there are some pages full of equations, but they're nowhere near as scary as they may appear at a glance). It'd probably help to have physics and maths A-levels, but it certainly doesn't require an undergraduate training. There is plenty here that I have never seen presented in such an effective way for that kind technical-end popular audience, and it's worth buying the book f...

It's hard to imagine a topic that is more rife with paradoxes than time travel (or 'Time Trave' as this book's trying-too-hard cover design appears to call it), so it shouldn't be surprising that this book itself is a paradox. There are few subjects more dripping with potential for fun popular science than time travel - but this isn't a popular science book. It's true that there are few writers who can rival James Gleick when he's on form at writing a popular science title. But this isn't one. Quietly, without fuss, he announces that time travel is impossible. It's not real. It could be a very short book... but it isn't. Perhaps I should have got a clue from the amount of time Gleick spends in the first two chapters on The Time Machine . Of course, it makes sense now. He's going to give us a rollicking exploration of the science fiction that has made time travel a part of our everyday lives and tell us more about the writers who'...

Update from early review which had been lost The 5,000 year struggle to align the clock with reality - and what happened to the missing ten days. Struggle is the word. It wasn't until 1949 that China joined the rest of the world on the Gregorian calendar - and the rest of us still suffered many hundreds of years on calendars that were hopelessly adrift with respect reality. There is a good opportunity for a mix of exploring historical characters and the very arbitrary formation of the 'human' side of the calendar - why is February the short month? Why is the tenth month called the eighth? - alongside the gradual astronomical developments that would pin the calendar the motion of the earth. Like many of the very tightly focused popular science books, this can be a little samey in places, but it is a fascinating story and rewards the reader throughout with delightful insights. What it lacks in narrative flow, it makes up with information that is well worth the effort. ...

This is a curious book that tries to be great - and it almost succeeds. Adam Frank makes a determined effort to interweave two apparently unconnected strands of science and technology history - the personal appreciation of time in human culture and our cosmology. Along the way he brings in a whole host of little details - whether or not you feel that the main aim of the book is successful, there is plenty to enjoy in here. To begin with, that blend of two disparate strands works very well. We start with time that is linked to the heavens and so is inevitably tied up with cosmology. Later on we get the monastic measures of time, the first clocks, the spread of mechanical time, electrical synchronisation and the railways, modern time keeping, the Outlook program from Microsoft Office and our modern hyper-connected, always aware world, and alongside it the move from mythical cosmologies through Greek and Copernican versions of the solar system, our expanding view of the ...

As I write this we are a third of the way through 2013 (time is important here) and I can say with hand on heart this is the best popular science book I have read all year. Lee Smolin’s book is largely accessible (more on this later) and simply mind-boggling in its scope. What he does here is take on time, and specifically the position of time in physics. Even taken as a simple book on time this is brilliant. The fact is, the majority of books that claim to be about time tell you nothing. It’s striking that  A Brief History of Time  tells us that amongst a list of deep scientific questions that have answers suggested by ‘Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies’, is ‘What is the nature of time?’ But you can search the book from end to end for any suggestion of what time is or how it works. There is plenty on how we observe time, and how interaction with matter can change these observations, but nothing deeper. Smolin gi...

  It can be something of a struggle to make a book stand out, to make it different from the crowd. In this case, Quercus Books has achieved the different feel by giving  The Big Questions: Physics  the appearance of a notebook. It’s a hardback with an elastic closure (the black stripe in the picture), just like many notebooks. I’ve a suspicion it’s one of those novelties that seemed a good idea at the time – all it does for the reader is get in the way a bit, though you can use it as a bookmark, but it does at least make the book, or rather the series, distinctive. My suspicion is that the whole approach didn’t work, as the paperback is a conventional design and has been retitled to pull out just one of the questions –  Can We Travel Through Time  (a question that isn’t really answered in the book – for that you need my  How to Build a Time Machine ). Although the book is an individual one by Michael Brooks, the series is a significant one in g...

If you remember James Burke (‘Good evening. [thoughtful pause; turn from one camera to another; raise an eyebrow] Or is it?’), you’re going to love How to Build a Time Machine! ( Build Your Own Time Machine in the UK.) James Burke is one of my heroes: the BBC’s moon-shot programmes, The Burke Special, The End of the Beginning, Tomorrow’s World , etc. However, it was his Connections programme that really got me. The way that one idea seeded some inkling of another – a tantalising Connection. It was a master-class in how to sneak up on a subject and then to hook the audience with a single line. Brian Clegg is surely cast from the same mould; he’s our contemporary JB. In How to Build a Time Machine we start each chapter with an affirmation: ‘Yes, time travel is possible …’. There’s clarification, ‘ifs’, often detailed historic references; consequences; and then the practicalities – at which point you might have the feeling that it’s not possible after all. But then there’s the ‘O...