Getting time

 

"The great paradox of time is that it is at once intimately familiar and yet deeply mysterious," writes Dan Falk.

 
 
 
 
 

In Search of Time
By Dan Falk
McClelland & Stewart, $32.99

Soul of the World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time
By Christopher Dewdney
HarperCollins, $29.95


"The great paradox of time is that it is at once intimately familiar and yet deeply mysterious," writes Dan Falk.

How cheap is that – stealing from a guy's own book to describe it. Yet the author has nailed this one; we all use time every day and feel we understand it, even though the likes of Einstein have had their hands full in comprehending it.

Time, then, for a book on it. And we have two, both by Canadians, more or less simultaneously. Go on, make your own time joke.

Dan Falk writes about science, mostly. Christopher Dewdney doesn't, mostly. There's scope for both approaches here, and the funny thing about time is that you can't divorce the science half of time from the human-experience half.

Oddly, Stephen Hawking tried to tackle time in the mid-1990s, and flopped. A Brief History of Time was a great title and a lousy book -- in the sense that it attempted to make time-science accessible to the masses, and failed. (Have you actually read it? Didn't think so.)

So, the problems. The big stumbling block is the modern physics problem: Relativity, with its doctrine that time and space are both relative, so that someone who travels very fast actually experiences a slowing-down of time. But long before Einstein dropped that on us, scientist after scientist was grappling with equally baffling stuff.

Does time flow, like a river? Is time changing from past to present to future, or is it sitting still while we move through it? If "now" is a single point, how does one such point connect to the next one? Points, after all, are infinitely small, and Aristotle argued this means that they can't actually contact each other.

Falk's book is what Hawking's Brief History should have been. Falk's isn't the kind of book you have to read from beginning to end; it's actually a collection of 12 essays. You can start almost anywhere. And if you expect a book on time to follow chronological order, don't. He doesn't arrive at the birth of the universe -- the Big Bang -- until Chapter 9, after Newton and Einstein and time travel. Instead his approach is more thematic: a chapter on time travel, one on how civilizations grappled with calendars that kept going wonky, the development of atomic clocks, and so on.

Falk figured out before he typed a word that a book on time has to be about people, too. The resulting book is not a math or physics text, but rather the long human exploration of this area. It moves from our initial sense that we understand time, into our wrestling with any attempt to define it. And finally the solid ticking of a dependable clock breaks down as time becomes stretchy in relativity, like rubber.

With a dose of God thrown in occasionally, even by Newton. Do we understand less at the end of such an inquiry than when we started?

Saint Augustine evidently thought so. Falk quotes him: "What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know, but if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." A good summary for our age, 1,600 years later.

It's a tough puzzle, and seems to separate those who get it -- the physics crowd -- from those who don't. That makes it hard to explain to the "don't get it" group. Falk, though, does admirably. His main chapter on Einstein, for example, brings just about the clearest explanation of special relativity I can imagine, and it's a gift to be able to write about this clearly. The paradoxes of time travel get a bit more dense, and demand that the reader have a quiet room and a good supply of coffee. Still, each chapter is a new topic -- encouraging if the previous one ended in some fog.

So it won't all make sense to everyone. It's still the kind of book that every reader with a high-school education should be able to read most of. And along the way, Falk sneaks in an admirable toolkit, explaining a vast number of the basic concepts of cosmology and physics with a minimum of fuss. Light years. Newton's laws of motion. The speed of light. The Big Bang. Laws of thermodynamics. These are not easy concepts, yet he deals with them surprisingly gently.

Along comes Christopher Dewdney -- not a scientist, just a guy who spent many nights in childhood lying awake, worrying about the future. It got him interested in time.

He was fascinated early on by the relationship of time and space, as measured in childhood terms: Counting "one steamboat, two steamboat" to figure out how far away the lightning was, and how long a branch of it reached. Along the way he also became a writer, though not a science writer particularly. He has been a finalist for four Governor's General awards (twice for non-fiction and twice for poetry) and teaches at Glendon College, which begat York University.

Like Falk, he has written a book whose chapters can separate and re-mix without interrupting any crucial order. (Don't like one? Try another.) Dewdney is better at recognizing the human element of time: what the concept means to us. It's the humanist's view, not the pure scientist's.

He quotes historian Lewis Mumford: "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." Actually he quotes rather a lot of people. It can be overwhelming, like reading a dictionary of quotations, but it does give a feel for the sheer number of writers who have wrestled with what time is, and where we stand in relation to it.

He does cover Newton and Einstein, but in far less detail that Falk. If Falk is the more thorough science writer, you can't ignore the sense of fascination that Dewdney brings.

His favourite interest (and mine, in reading his work) is what "now" entails, and how our consciousness always appears to be in the present even as it slides along from 2007 to 2008 and beyond. The idea that the same time-frame, or "now," applies to people everywhere is, he says, "the closest thing I have to an article of faith, an idea of God." And Einstein went and ripped it apart with relativity decades before Dewdney was even born.

He does cover some scientific details that Falk passes by, in particular the fascinating field of tiny units of time, attoseconds and femtoseconds. These are what's left when you divide a billionth of a second into a further millionth (femtosecond) or even a further billionth (attosecond). In effect, this almost freezes time, a fact not lost on photographers. Dewdney and Ottawa's own Albert Stolow, a femtosecond researcher at the National Research Council, share an interest in the photos of Eadweard Muybridge, whose ultra-fast photos of a running horse proved in 1878 that a horse can have all four feet in the air at once.

It's the kind of moment that cuts through pure textbook science and brings life to the story of how humans pursue understanding of a phenomenon that feels so simple, but isn't. Falk and Dewdney both have a strong feel for this -- for making a reader want to wrestle right along with the big boys and girls.

It's a wonderful topic. Which is why Hawking should have done better.

The Ottawa Citizen
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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