Calendars and the celebration of feasts and holidays form an important part of religious and national movements and are sometimes the cause of schism. The Qumran community followed a solar calendar differing from the lunar calendar observed at the Temple in Jerusalem. This volume contains their texts relating to its calendar.

First published in 1975 and still without equal, this anthology provides a thorough overview of the concept of time in the Western philosophic tradition. Encompassing a wide range of writings, from the Book of Genesis to the work of twentieth-century philosophers such as Collingwood and McKeon, all with introductory essays by editor Charles M. Sherover, The Human Experience of Time offers a synoptic view of the changing philosophic notions of time. Updated, expanded, and with a new introduction by the editor, this volume is not only a historical overview but also a dialectical analysis displaying the diverse approaches to the continuing philosophic exploration of time.

Clock synchronisation is the backbone of applications such as high-accuracy satellite navigation, geolocation, space-based interferometry, and cryptographic communication systems. The high accuracy of synchronisation needed over satellite-to-ground and satellite-to-satellite distances requires the use of general relativistic concepts. The role of geometrical optics and antenna phase centre approximations are discussed in high accuracy work. The clock synchronisation problem is explored from a general relativistic point of view, with emphasis on the local measurement process and the use of the tetrad formalism as the correct model of relativistic measurements. The treatment makes use of J. L. Synge's world function of space-time as a basic co-ordinate independent geometric concept. A metric is used for space-time in the vicinity of the Earth, where co-ordinate time is proper time on the geoid. The problem of satellite clock syntonisation is analysed by numerically integrating the geodesic equations of motion for low-Earth orbit (LEO), geosynchronous orbit (GEO), and highly elliptical orbit (HEO) satellites. Proper time minus co-ordinate time is computed for satellites in these orbital regimes. The frequency shift as a function of time is computed for a signal observed on the Earth's geoid from a LEO, GEO, and HEO satellite. Finally, the problem of geolocation in curved space-time is briefly explored using the world function formalism.

The smooth functioning of an ordered society depends on the possession of a means of regularising its activities over time. That means is a calendar, and its regularity is a function of how well it models the more or less regular movements of the celestial bodies - of the moon, the sun or the stars. Greek and Roman Calendars examines the ancient calendar as just such a time-piece, whose elements are readily described in astronomical and mathematical terms. The story of these calendars is one of a continuous struggle to maintain a correspondence with the regularity of the seasons and the sun, despite the fact that the calendars were usually based on the irregular moon. But on another, more human level, Greek and Roman Calendars steps beyond the merely mathematical and studies the calendar as a social instrument, which people used to organise their activities. It sets the calendars of the Greeks and Romans on a stage occupied by real people, who developed and lived with these time-pieces for a variety of purposes - agricultural, religious, political and economic. This is also a story of intersecting cultures, of Greeks with Greeks, of Greeks with Persians and Egyptians, and of Greeks with Romans, in which various calendaric traditions clashed or compromised.

A perfect balance of science, history, and sociology, Time's Pendulum traces the important developments in humankind's epic quest to measure the hours, days, and years with accuracy, and how our concept of time has changed with each new technological breakthrough. Written in an easy-to-follow chronological format and illustrated with entertaining anecdotes, author Jo Ellen Barnett's history of timekeeping covers everything from the earliest sundials and water clocks, to the pendulum and the more recent advances of battery-powered, quartz-regulated wrist watches and the powerful radioactive "clock," which loses only a few billionths of a second per day, making it nearly ten billion times more accurate than the pendulum clock. A tour of the discoveries and the inventors who endeavored to chart and understand time, Time's Pendulum also explains how each new advance gradually transformed our perception of the world.

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.

Richard Sorabji here takes time as his central theme, exploring fundamental questions about its nature: Is it real or an aspect of consciousness? Did it begin along with the universe? Can anything escape from it? Does it come in atomic chunks? In addressing these and myriad other issues, Sorabji engages in an illuminating discussion of early thought about time, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish medieval thinkers. Sorabji argues that the thought of these often neglected philosophers about the subject is, in many cases, more complete than that of their more recent counterparts.

The fascinating story of an ancient riddle?and what it reveals about the nature of time and space
Three millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of logical paradoxes to prove that motion is impossible. Today, these paradoxes remain on the cutting edge of our investigations into the fabric of space and time. "Zeno's Paradox" uses the motion paradox as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the twenty-five-hundred-year quest to uncover the true nature of the universe. From Galileo to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, some of the greatest minds in history have tackled the problem and made spectacular breakthroughs?but through it all, the paradox of motion remains.

Time and matter are the most fundamental concepts in physics and in any science-based description of the world around us. Quantum theory has, however, revealed many novel insights into these concepts in non-relativistic, relativistic and cosmological contexts. The implications of these novel perspectives have been realized and, in particular, probed experimentally only recently. In the papers in this proceedings, these issues are discussed in a truly interdisciplinary fashion from philosophical and historical perspectives. The leading contributors, including Nobel laureates T W H?nsch and G t' Hooft, address both experimental and theoretical issues.

Bored during Mass at the cathedral in Pisa, the seventeen-year-old Galileo regarded the chandelier swinging overhead-and remarked, to his great surprise, that the lamp took as many beats to complete an arc when hardly moving as when it was swinging widely. Galileo's Pendulum tells the story of what this observation meant, and of its profound consequences for science and technology. The principle of the pendulum's swing-a property called isochronism-marks a simple yet fundamental system in nature, one that ties the rhythm of time to the very existence of matter in the universe. Roger Newton sets the stage for Galileo's discovery with a look at biorhythms in living organisms and at early calendars and clocks-contrivances of nature and culture that, however adequate in their time, did not meet the precise requirements of seventeenth-century science and navigation. Galileo's Pendulum recounts the history of the newly evolving time pieces-from marine chronometers to atomic clocks-based on the pendulum as well as other mechanisms employing the same physical principles, and explains the Newtonian science underlying their function. The book ranges nimbly from the sciences of sound and light to the astonishing intersection of the pendulum's oscillations and quantum theory, resulting in new insight into the make-up of the material universe. Covering topics from the invention of time zones to Isaac Newton's equations of motion, from Pythagoras's theory of musical harmony to Michael Faraday's field theory and the development of quantum electrodynamics, Galileo's Pendulum is an authoritative and engaging tour through time of the most basic all-pervading system in the world.

In this fascinating book, the renowned astrophysicist J. Richard Gott leads time travel out of the world of H. G. Wells and into the realm of scientific possibility. Building on theories posited by Einstein and advanced by scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Gott explains how time travel can actually occur. He describes, with boundless enthusiasm and humor, how travel to the future is not only possible but has already happened, and he contemplates whether travel to the past is also conceivable. Notable not only for its extraordinary subject matter and scientific brilliance, Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe is a delightful and captivating exploration of the surprising facts behind the science fiction of time travel.

The Medieval Calendar Year celebrates the pictorial convention known as "The Labors of the Months" and the ways it was used in the Middle Ages. Richly illustrated and elegantly presented, it provides valuable insights into prevailing social attitudes and values and will fascinate all readers who are interested in the history and culture of medieval Europe.

The "Labors" cycle was most popular during the High Middle Ages (ca. 1200-1500). The traditional cycle depicts the year as a round of seasonal activities on the land. Each month has its allotted task, and each of these represents one stage in the never-ending process of providing food for society. The small scenes that made up the cycle were well-known and used widely throughout Europe. They were chosen to decorate both public and private spaces: churches and houses, town fountains, baptismal fonts, as well as books of devotion intended both for priests and for the laity. The cycle was sculpted in stone, carved in wood, painted on glass and on manuscript pages. Examples from such media are described, but most of the illustrations have been taken from manuscripts, primarily Books of Hours.

The author has spent the past fifteen years studying calendar after calendar, and one of her great strengths is her ability to see the social reality that lies hidden, even masked, behind the stylized presentation. In the chapter on winter, she shows how the image of this season, dreaded in the Middle Ages, was softened and sweetened by calendar artists to bring it more into harmony with the characteristic mood of the cycle as a whole. For autumn, she reveals how depictions of the harvest of grain, grapes, and livestock hint at a sophisticated market economy. Thematic chapters on children, women, and the hardship of work brilliantly cut through idealized conventions and assumptions to unveil the underlying complexities of life.

The "Labors" cycle and its social context have not hitherto been examined in depth and with the care they deserve. The Medieval Calendar Year is a book worthy of the beautiful and beguiling tradition it describes.

Estudios de los Mayas/La Nueva Edad "La lectura de este libro es una experiencia impactante y electrizante; cada pagina nos permite comprender perspicazmente los misterios mas profundos de la historia humana y de la evolucion de la consciencia mundial." --Michael E. Salla, Ph.D., Centro para la Paz Mundial El calendario profetico Maya no esta ajustado al movimiento de los cuerpos planetarios, mas bien funciona como un mapa metafisico de la evolucion de la consciencia y registra como fluye el tiempo espiritual, brindando una nueva ciencia del tiempo. El calendario esta asociado a nueve ciclos de creacion, cada uno de los cuales representa uno de los nueve niveles de consciencia o Submundo presentes en la piramide cosmica de los mayas. Al utilizar investigaciones empiricas, Carl Johan Calleman muestra como esta estructura piramidal del desarrollo de la consciencia puede explicar temas tan dispares como el origen comun de las religiones del mundo y el reclamo de nuestros dias de que parece que el tiempo se mueve mas rapido. Los lectores aprenderan que en realidad el tiempo se esta acelerando a medida que hacemos una transicion entre el materialista Submundo Planetario que nos rige hoy, hacia una frecuencia nueva y mas elevada de la consciencia --el Submundo Galactico---- lo cual nos prepara para el ultimo nivel universal de esclarecimiento de la consciencia. El Calendario Maya y la Transformacion de la Consciencia da a conocer el calendario Maya como un recurso espiritual que permite una comprension mayor de la naturaleza de la evolucion de la consciencia a traves de toda la historia humana, y como este brinda los pasos concretos que podemos tomar para alinearnos con este desarrollo haciael esclarecimiento. CARL JOHAN CALLEMAN posee un doctorado en biologia fisica y ha servido como experto en cancer a la Organizacion Mundial de la Salud (World Health Organization). En 1979 comenzo sus estudios sobre el calendario Maya y ahora imparte conferencias por todo el mundo; tambien es autor de Solving the Greatest Mystery of Our Time: The Mayan Calendar. Calleman vive en Suecia.

The untold story of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin?

The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time. In the eighteenth century, naturalist Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled, came up with an age of 74,832 years, even though he suspected this was far too low. Biology then had a go in the hands of fossil hunter Johann Scheuchzer, who alleged to have found a specimen of a man drowned at the time of Noah's flood. Regrettably it was only the imprint of a large salamander.

And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics, radioactivity, and, most recently, the astronomers at the controls of the Hubble space telescope, who put the beginning of time at 13.4 billion years ago (give or take a billion). Taking the reader into the laboratories and salons of scholars and scientists, visionaries and eccentrics, Measuring Eternity is an engagingly written account of an epic, often quixotic quest, of how individuals who dedicated their lives to solving an enduring mystery advanced our knowledge of the universe.


From the Hardcover edition.

Judaism and Christianity are both religions of history and remembrance and rely on calendars and accurate chronologies to recall and reenact the signal events in their histories. The import of dividing the day and night, of knowing the moment of Sabbath and Lord's Day, of properly timing Passover and Easter cannot be overstated. Throughout the history of both religions, these issues were central to worship and practice of religion and had far-reaching effects from messianism to prophecy. But their very centrality meant they were issues of controversy and debate. Roger Beckwith looks carefully at the Jewish and Christian records concerning calendar and chronology, compares, contrasts, and challenges rival solutions to these complex questions. His breath of research -- from the ancient Near East to Qumran, from Josephus and Philo to the Maccabean writings, and from the points of view of Paul and Jesus to the Fathers of the church -- and his focus on the more controversial issues of dating make Calendar and Chronology an essential book for any serious scholar of history, liturgy, worship, and interpretation.

What is time? Is there a link between objective knowledge about time and subjective experience of time? And what is eternity? Does religion have the answer? Does science?Internationally known scholar Antje Jackelen investigates the problem and concept of time. Her study draws on her experiences in the Continental-European science and religion dialogue, with a particular focus on the German, Scandinavian, and Anglo-American dialogues. Her analysis of the subject includes: The notion of time and eternity as it is narrated through Christian hymn books stemming from Germany, Sweden, and the English-speaking world, with insights into changes of the concept and understanding of time in Christian spirituality over the past few decadesTheological approaches to time and eternity, as well as a look at Trinitarian theology and its relation to timeThe discussion of scientific theories of time, including Newtonian, relativistic, quantum, and chaos theoriesThe formulation of a "theology of time," a theological-mathematical model incorporating relational thinking oriented toward the future, the doctrine of trinity, and the notion of eschatology