This ground-breaking book addresses transformations in the understanding of time and the generation and degeneration of value at the cutting edge of modernity and postmodernity. The book is a multi-disciplinary contribution to current work in the social sciences, in cultural theory and in more pragmatic areas such as advertising and global communication. It brings together the work of distinguished international scholars and new young thinkers.

"Time and Value" contains an exploration of such themes as the timescapes of nature and the impact of disease, ecological catastrophe, and many other issues. In theoretical terms, the collection draws in particular upon writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Paul Virilio and Martin Heidegger, whose work is particularly relevant in considering how technology has had a powerful impact upon the construal of time and the explanation of how time constructs human lives in late modernity.

The compression of time and its fragmentation correspond with a collapse in and reconstruction of value systems. This deconstruction of time is juxtaposed with a range of possibilities that emerge when the specific times of the media, literature, art, virtuality, nature, performance, fashion, semiotic codings, spirituality, the self and the body are understood as creative opportunity.

The idea of time travel has tantalized humans for millennia. We can send humans into space, but roaming through time has eluded us. Do the laws of physics demand that we stay trapped in the present? This book examines the past, present and future states of time-travel research, but, also, looks at the bizarre anomalies of time itself.

Deep time is the timescale of the geological events that have shaped our planet. Whilst so immense as to challenge human understanding, its evidence is nonetheless visible all around us. Through explanations of the latest research and over 200 fascinating images, Deep Time explores this evidence, from the visible layers in ancient rock to the hiss of static on the radio, and from fossilized shark's teeth to underwater forests. These relics of ancient epochs, many of which we can see and touch today, connect our present to the distant past and answer broader questions about our place in the timeline of the Earth. Charting 4.5 billion years of geological history, this is the story of our world, from its birth to the dawn of civilization.

A readable and entertaining look at how Einstein's special theory of relativity gives us a new understanding of the nature of time Relativity ought to be an important part of everyone's education. Its subject is time, with which we all think we are familiar. Einstein's special theory of relativity reveals that some of our most intuitive notions about time are shockingly wrong. This clear, lively, and informal exposition of special relativity takes a highly original approach to introduce readers to the true nature of time. It is accessible to anyone who remembers a little high school algebra and elementary geometry. It's About Time offers deep insights to curious readers who have no technical scientific background.

This book is about how big is the universe and how small are quarks, and what are the sizes of dozens of things between these two extremes. It describes the sizes of atoms and planets, quarks and galaxies, cells and sequoias. It is a romp through forty-five orders of magnitude from the smallest sub-nuclear particles we have measured, to the edge of the observed universe. It also looks at time, from the epic age of the cosmos to the fleeting lifetimes of ethereal particles. It is a narrative that trips its way from stellar magnitudes to the clocks on GPS satellites, from the nearly logarithmic scales of a piano keyboard through a system of numbers invented by Archimedes and on to the measurement of the size of an atom. Why do some things happen at certain scales? Why are cells a hundred thousandths of a meter across? Why are stars never smaller than about 100 million meters in diameter? Why are trees limited to about 120 meters in height? Why are planets spherical, but asteroids not? Often the size of an object is determined by something simple but quite unexpected. The size of a cell and a star depend in part on the ratio of surface area to volume. The divide between the size of a spherical planet and an irregular asteroid is the balance point between the gravitational forces and the chemical forces in nature. Most importantly, with a very few basic principles, it all makes sense. The world really is a most reasonable place.

"A discussion of the historical development of our ideas of time as they relate to nature, human nature and society. . . . The excellence of "The Discovery of Time" is unquestionable."--Martin Lebowitz, "The Kenyon Review"

A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In "Telling Time," Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work.
Through brilliant readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's daily "Spectator," the travel writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in prose--the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments--within the cultural context of the daily institutions which gave it form and motion. "Telling Time" is not only a major accomplishment for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary studies, but it also makes important contributions to current discourse in cultural studies.

One Time Fits All provides the first full framework for understanding attributes of civil time, which is used throughout the world today. It focuses on three components of uniform time all linked to the prime meridian at Greenwich-the International Date Line, the worldwide system of Standard Time zones, and Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time)-tracing the story of their beginnings and eventual acceptance from original sources in Europe, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. The book concludes with an examination of the recent changes in America's Daylight Saving Time that are scheduled to take effect in 2007.

Two systems of timekeeping were in concurrent use in Venice between 1582 and 1797. Government documents conformed to the Venetian year (beginning 1 March), church documents to the papal year (from 1 January). "Song and Season" defines the many ways in which time was discussed, resolving a long-standing fuzziness imposed on studies of personnel, institutions, and cultural dynamics by dating conflicts. It is in this context that the standardization of timekeeping coincided with the collapse of the "dramma per musica" and the rise of scripted comedy and the "opera buffa," Selfridge-Field discloses fascinating relationships between the musical stage and the cultures it served, such as the residues of medieval liturgical feasts embedded in the theatrical year. Such associations were transmuted into lingering seasonal associations with specific dramatic genres. Interactions between culture and chronology thus operated on both general and specific levels. Both are fundamental to understanding theatrical dynamics of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

An accessible and thought-provoking introduction to timespans in the natural world, featuring more than 80 beautifully designed diagrams. Which organisms live the longest? How does the natural world recover from fire? How long do eggs take to hatch? What are the world's fastest and slowest growing plants? Which species invest the most in parental care? How Nature Keeps Time discovers the natural world's most important and intriguing patterns of time. Beautifully designed with stunning colour photography and more than 80 reader-friendly charts and diagrams, this witty book examines a broad range of species from across the world and throughout time. From the lifecycle of immortal jellyfish and identifying the perfect amount of time for a 'good sleep' to mass extinction and the destruction of the coral reef, Helen Pilcher tackles highly relevant and fascinating topics in this deeply entertaining read.

A storehouse of useful, interesting, and curious knowledge about time and its reckoning, based on the premise that every day is memorable. The book is in two parts: an authoritative survey of the calendar year, and a section on the measurement of time and the calculation of movable feasts. It is illustrated with 16 pages of black-and-white plates.

The arrow of time refers to the curious asymmetry that distinguishes the future from the past. Reversing the Arrow of Time argues that there is an intimate link between the symmetries of 'time itself' and time reversal symmetry in physical theories, which has wide-ranging implications for both physics and its philosophy. This link helps to clarify how we can learn about the symmetries of our world; how to understand the relationship between symmetries and what is real, and how to overcome pervasive illusions about the direction of time. Roberts explains the significance of time reversal in a way that intertwines physics and philosophy, to establish what the arrow of time means and how we can come to know it. This book is both mathematically and philosophically rigorous yet remains accessible to advanced undergraduates in physics and philosophy of physics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries technical chronology, the study of calendars and of dates in ancient and medieval history, was both a fashionable and a controversial discipline. Theologians debated the dates of the Creation, the Flood, and the Crucifixion. Astronomers and historians argued about the identity of the eclipses that could supply absolute dates for events long past. Classical scholars reconstructed the religious beliefs and political practices that had governed the Greek and Roman calendars. Clerics and consultant experts, finally, debated what was to be done to mend the obviously faulty calendar of the western Church. Poliziano and Pico, Luther and Melanchthon, Copernicus and Kepler all studied and wrote about chronology. Late in the 1570s Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) turned his attention to this field. He had already established himself as an innovative and ingenious editor of Latin texts, as the first volume of this study showed. But he now became one of the most celebrated scholars in Europe. He synthesized the work of dozens of other scholars, many of them now forgotten. He started or took part in many technical debates. And on such central problems as the date and nature of the Last Supper, the reliability of the various Old Testament texts, and the worth of the fragmentary historians of the ancient Near East, he showed remarkable erudition and insight. This book tells the stories of chronology and of Scaliger himself. It describes the scholarly circles in which he moved - above all the University of Leiden, the most innovative in Europe, where he spent the last decade and a half of his life. And it reconstructs his relations with contemporary scholars and scientists - notably Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler - and his remarkable, if wholly unofficial, career as a teacher. It is a sequel to volume I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis, published in 1983.

Following one of the most inspiring and fascinating stories linked to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, this book centres on the life and achievements of John Harrison - designer and builder of the first accurate marine chronometers. Inspired by the official prize offered in 1714 to anyone who could solve the problem of finding longitudinal position at sea, Harrison produced his four famous 'H' timepieces. In doing so, he helped revolutionise sea travel, saving many thousands of lives. John Harrison and the Quest for Longitude is the intriguing account of one man driven by the need to solve one of the greatest practical problems of his time.

An engaging, encyclopedic account of the material world of early modern Britain as told through a unique collection of dated objects The period from 1500 to 1800 in England was one of extraordinary social transformations, many having to do with the way time itself was understood, measured, and recorded. Through a focused exploration of an extensive private collection of fine and decorative artworks, this beautifully designed volume explores that theme and the variety of ways that individual notions of time and mortality shifted. The feature uniting these more than 450 varied objects is that each one bears a specific date, which marks a significant moment-for reasons personal or professional, religious or secular, private or public. From paintings to porringers, teapots to tape measures, the objects-and the stories they tell-offer a vivid sense of the lived experience of time, while providing a sweeping survey of the material world of early modern Britain. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art

Days, months, and years were given to us by nature, but we invented the week for ourselves. There is nothing inevitable about a seven-day cycle, or about any other kind of week; it represents an arbitrary rhythm imposed on our activities, unrelated to anything in the natural order. But where the week exists--and there have been many cultures where it doesn't--it is so deeply embedded in our experience that we hardly ever question its rightness, or think of it as an artificial convention; for most of us it is a matter of 'second nature.'

"Patience, patience, because the great movements of history have always begun in those small parenthesis that we call 'in the meantime.'" --John Berger The last book that John Berger wrote was this precious little volume about time titled What Time Is It?, now posthumously published for the first time in English by Notting Hill Editions. Berger died before it was completed, but the text has been assembled and illustrated by his longtime collaborator and friend Sel uk Demirel, and has an introduction by Maria Nadotti. What Time Is It? is a profound and playful meditation on the illusory nature of time. Berger, the great art critic and Man Booker Prize-winning author, reflects on what time has come to mean to us in modern life. Our perception of time assumes a uniform and ceaseless passing of time, yet time is turbulent. It expands and contracts according to the intensity of the lived moment. We talk of time "saved" in a hundred household appliances; time, like money, is exchanged for the content it lacks. Berger posits the idea that time can lengthen lifetimes once we seize the present moment. "What-is-to-come, what-is-to-be-gained empties what-is."

How old is Earth? Can we look back in time? How long is a light year? How short is a femtosecond? What is Greenwich Mean Time? How did astronauts tell the time on the Moon? When did time begin? It's high time you knew the answers to these and many more intriguing questions, so why not pass the time reading this lighthearted, illustrated miscellany, packed with hundreds of amazing facts from the time experts at the Royal Observatory. In less than no time, you'll have discovered the myriad of influences that time has on our daily lives.

An invaluable resource for working programmers, as well as a fount of useful algorithmic tools for computer scientists, astronomers, and other calendar enthusiasts, The Ultimate Edition updates and expands the previous edition to achieve more accurate results and present new calendar variants. The book now includes coverage of Unix dates, Italian time, the Akan, Icelandic, Saudi Arabian Umm al-Qura, and Babylonian calendars. There are also expanded treatments of the observational Islamic and Hebrew calendars and brief discussions of the Samaritan and Nepalese calendars. Several of the astronomical functions have been rewritten to produce more accurate results and to include calculations of moonrise and moonset. The authors frame the calendars of the world in a completely algorithmic form, allowing easy conversion among these calendars and the determination of secular and religious holidays. LISP code for all the algorithms is available in machine-readable form.

The Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, which provided the basis for the civil and Western ecclesiastical calendars still in use today, has often been seen as a triumph of early modern scientific culture or an expression of papal ambition in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. Much less attention has been paid to reform's intellectual roots in the European Middle Ages, when the reckoning of time by means of calendrical cycles was a topic of central importance to learned culture, as impressively documented by the survival of relevant texts and tables in thousands of manuscripts copied before 1500. For centuries prior to the Gregorian reform, astronomers, mathematicians, theologians, and even Church councils had been debating the necessity of improving or emending the existing ecclesiastical calendar, which throughout the Middle Ages kept losing touch with the astronomical phenomena at an alarming pace. Scandalous Error is the first comprehensive study of the medieval literature devoted to the calendar problem and its cultural and scientific contexts. It examines how the importance of ordering liturgical time by means of a calendar that comprised both solar and lunar components posed a technical-astronomical problem to medieval society and details the often sophisticated ways in which computists and churchmen reacted to this challenge. By drawing attention to the numerous connecting paths that existed between calendars and mathematical astronomy between the Fall of Rome and the end of the fifteenth century, the volume offers substantial new insights on the place of exact science in medieval culture.

The prophet Muhammad and the early Islamic community radically redefined the concept of time that they had inherited from earlier religions' beliefs and practices. This new temporal system, based on a lunar calendar and era, was complex and required sophistication and accuracy. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, it was the Muslim astronomers of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires who were responsible for the major advances in mathematics, astronomy and astrology. This fascinating study compares the Islamic concept of time, and its historical and cultural significance, across these three great empires. Each empire, while mindful of earlier models, created a new temporal system, fashioning a new solar calendar and era and a new round of rituals and ceremonies from the cultural resources at hand. This book contributes to our understanding of the Muslim temporal system and our appreciation of the influence of Islamic science on the Western world.