A collection of works on the history and practices of time
The Natural Contract - Michel Serres
Michel Serres at his most political. This 1990 book is a defining work in the modern understanding of the climate crisis. I've written a long essay inspired by the depth and breadth of Serres vision.
Peter Galison - Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps
The twentieth century's need for national and global time was a problem of electromagnetism. It became an abstraction (as relativity) out of these practical and commercial concerns.
Dava Sobel - Longitude
Understanding Harrison's clocks is essential to understanding how we got from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and our own Modern age. The story of John Harrison's attempts to solve the Longitude Problem is a story about the changing historical consciousness of time.
Heidegger - Being and Time
With deference to Bergson, Heidegger's Being and Time is the lasting work with respect to philosophical thinking about time.
Birth of Physics - Michel Serres
Michel Serres makes Lucretius our contemporary. Published just before Le Parasite, Le Naissance de la physique was a key moment in the history of chaos theory and the ability to see order emerging from disorder -- a reversal of the Enlightenment's formula. Serres finds in Lucretius' De rerum natura a pre-Modern text that offers a more relevant way of thinking about order and disorder free of eternal natural laws.
A Tenth of a Second - Jimena Canales
Modernity didn’t just apply technologies of measuring time at more minute levels. Modernity and time measurement are bound together much more intimately.
The Genesis of the Copernican World - Hans Blumenberg
Copernicus did not kick humanity out of the center of the universe. He made the Earth a star and also tried to restore the harmonious relationship between God’s creation and humanity. The consequences for the configuration of time are underappreciated. This book corrects that.