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Books > Science & Mathematics > Astronomy, space & time > Time (chronology)
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used
their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal
culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during
the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly
assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the
project of modern state-building began to gather momentum. In
Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the
complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells
the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt
to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of
regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman
state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks
played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement
spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of
officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel
time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their
self-consciously "modern" outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in
the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they
came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress
and the former temporal patterns with the old political order.
Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer's
original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of
time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for
legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity
was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the
study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding
of the relationship between time and modernity.
Time is the one thing that is shared by all of humanity,
irrespective of wealth, health, race or credo; and one of the
things that makes us individual is how we choose to spend it. It is
one of the commodities over which we have most control, yet it is
the asset we value the least. Isn't it time we took control over
how we spend it, while we still can? Time will reward readers of
lifestyle quests who seek a better, richer, slower, more fulfilling
way of life. For anyone who has ever pondered the paradoxes of time
and who is interested in looking at their world from a fresh
perspective. Whether you want the encouragement to take time out on
a life-scale or simply adjust your life to accommodate a timetable
that suits you, this book will have plenty of inspiration,
suggestions and tips to help you get the most out of your time.
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.
A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that
culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, "Einstein's
Clocks, Poincare's Maps" is "part history, part science, part
adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of
modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires
and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with
physicists, engineers, technicians and others....Galison has
unearthed fascinating material" ("New York Times"). Clocks and
trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the
late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background
to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two
giants at the foundations of modern science were converging,
step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure
German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph
networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and
the renowned mathematician Henri Poincare, president of the French
Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents.
Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to
determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity
was absolute or whether time was relative. Esteemed historian of
science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen
photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the
fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional
preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that
would conquer the empire of time."
As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph
communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity,
previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a
global problem. Vanessa Ogle's chronicle of the struggle to
standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights
the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in
establishing international standards. Time played a foundational
role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing
interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the
annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global
consciousness. Time-historical, evolutionary, religious, social,
and legal-provided a basis for comparing the world's nations and
societies, and it established hierarchies that separated "advanced"
from "backward" peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote
European imperialism. Debates and disagreements on the varieties of
time drew in a wide array of observers: German government
officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators,
Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of
Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and
regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore
remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after
unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global
Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a
relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of
adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national
differences.
Presented from the viewpoint of the history of mathematics, this
book explores both epistemological aspects of Chinese traditional
mathematical astronomy and lunisolar calendrical calculations. The
following issues are addressed: (1) connections with non-Chinese
cultural areas; (2) the possibility or impossibility of using
mathematics to predict astronomical phenomena, a question that was
constantly raised by the Chinese from antiquity through medieval
times; (3) the modes of representation of numbers, and in
particular the zero, found in the context of Chinese calendrical
calculations; and (4) a detailed analysis of lunisolar calendrical
calculations. Fully worked-out examples and comparisons between the
results of calculations and the content of Chinese historical
calendars from various periods are provided. Traditional Chinese
calendrical and mathematical astronomy consists of permanently
reformed mathematical procedures designed to predict, but not
explain, phenomena pertaining to astronomy and related areas. Yet,
despite appearances, models of the mathematical techniques hidden
behind this voluminous corpus reveal that they depend on a limited
number of clear-cut mathematical structures. Although only a small
fraction of these techniques have been fully studied, what is known
surprisingly broadens our knowledge of the history of Chinese
mathematics. Sinologists interested in the history of Chinese
science, and anyone interested in the history of Chinese
mathematics, the Chinese calendar, and the history of Chinese
mathematical astronomy from its origin (104 BC) to its European
reform (AD 1644) will find this book very useful. The present
English language edition is a fully revised and updated version of
the French original. Even though this is a research monograph in
sinology, no particular sinological background is required,
although a basic understanding of 'concrete mathematics' is needed.
From the reviews of the French edition: This is a demanding,
rigorous book to read ...worth the concentrated study it requires.
The rewards are not only in the details but in the general overview
that ...[it] provides. Joseph Dauben, EASTM, 2011 ...first Work in
a Western language to turn to for anyone interested in the details
of Chinese calendrical computations. Benno Van Dalen, ISIS, 2011
Martzloff's careful scholarship and his overall look at the
calendar beyond astronomical calculations, ..., make this book a
most valuable contributions to a field of increasing interest. U.
D'Ambrosio, Mathematical Reviews, 2013
In "It's About Time," N. David Mermin asserts that relativity
ought to be an important part of everyone's education--after all,
it is largely about time, a subject with which all are familiar.
The book reveals that some of our most intuitive notions about time
are shockingly wrong, and that the real nature of time discovered
by Einstein can be rigorously explained without advanced
mathematics. This readable exposition of the nature of time as
addressed in Einstein's theory of relativity is accessible to
anyone who remembers a little high school algebra and elementary
plane geometry.
The book evolved as Mermin taught the subject to diverse groups
of undergraduates at Cornell University, none of them science
majors, over three and a half decades. Mermin's approach is
imaginative, yet accurate and complete. Clear, lively, and
informal, the book will appeal to intellectually curious readers of
all kinds, including even professional physicists, who will be
intrigued by its highly original approach.
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The Flutes of time
(Paperback)
Pedro Costa; Illustrated by Pedro Bento; Edited by Daisy Gillott
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R180
Discovery Miles 1 800
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Our Own Time retells the history of American labor by focusing on
the politics of time and the movements for a shorter working day.
It argues that the length of the working day has been the central
issue for the American labor movement during its most vigorous
periods of activity, uniting workers along lines of craft, gender
and ethnicity. The authors hold that the workweek is likely again
to take on increased significance as workers face the choice
between a society based on free time and one based on alienated
work and employment.
Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the
disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis In 2016,
Antarctica's Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago,
detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean
waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the
disjunctive temporalities of our era's-the
Anthropocene's-ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating
degradation of our planet's life-supporting environment established
slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond
to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean
acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires
reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between
past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the
planet's. Timescales' collection of lively and thought-provoking
essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and
anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art
historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual
spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time
and historical particularity, between ecological crises and
cultural expression, between environmental policy and social
constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries,
and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable)
hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary
"etudes," in which artists describe experimental works that explore
the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason
Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanja Brown, College of Wooster;
Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock,
Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans,
Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; OEmur
Harmansah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary
Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia,
California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E.
Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U.
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The Future
(Paperback)
Vasile Munteanu
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R392
R322
Discovery Miles 3 220
Save R70 (18%)
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The book focuses on the study of the temporal behavior of complex
many-particle systems. The phenomenon of time and its role in the
temporal evolution of complex systems is a remaining mystery. The
book presents the necessity of the interdisciplinary point of view
regarding on the phenomenon of time.The aim of the present study is
to summarize and formulate in a concise but clear form the trends
and approaches to the concept of time from a broad
interdisciplinary perspective exposing tersely the complementary
approaches and theories of time in the context of thermodynamics,
statistical physics, cosmology, theory of information, biology and
biophysics, including the problem of time and aging. Various
approaches to the problem show that time is an extraordinarily
interdisciplinary and multifaceted underlying notion which plays an
extremely important role in various natural complex processes.
Biblical Foundations Award Finalist Holidays today are often
established by legislation, and calendars are published on paper
and smart phones. But how were holidays chosen and taught in
biblical Israel? And what might these holidays have to do with the
creation narrative? In this book, Michael LeFebvre considers the
calendars of the Pentateuch with their basis in the heavenly lights
and the land's agricultural cadences. He argues that dates were
added to Old Testament narratives not as journalistic details but
to teach sacred rhythms of labor and worship. LeFebvre then applies
this insight to the creation week, finding that the days of
creation also serve a liturgical purpose and not a scientific one.
The Liturgy of Creation restores emphasis on the religious function
of the creation week as a guide for Sabbath worship. Scholars,
students, and church members alike will appreciate LeFebvre's
careful scholarship and pastoral sensibilities.
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