Featured Essays
The Discovery of Time - Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield
Humans are not automatically born with a consciousness of how long the Earth has been around. The Discovery of Time traces the story of how Enlightenment geologists undid the long-standing consensus that the events of Genesis occurred around 4000 BCE. This is perhaps the Enlightenment's greatest legacy.
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.
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin argues that physics should no longer treats time as an experiential illusion. It is fundamental to the universe because everything is relational and evolving.
NOW: The Physics of Time - Richard A. Muller
Richard Muller argues that if space is expanding (the Hubble Expansion), then time must also be expanding. The universe lives on a "leading edge of time" that is the continuously rolling now.
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time
A largely speculative work by one of the more famous theorists of Loop Quantum Gravity. Time is not fundamental for Rovelli, it is emergent.
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.