An article came through my RSS feeds yesterday that looked for all the world like the New York Times was copying our Basic Concepts idea. Labelled as "Basics," it promised to provide a general discussion of the concept of time. "You bastards!" I thought.
The actual article by Natalie Angier isn't all that similar to what you'll get from Basic Concepts posts on ScienceBlogs, taking much more of a humanities-major kind of approach, and giving a wide and fluffy survey of different concepts of time. It's still an interesting read, though.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty…
Because you read this blog, you are no doubt aware that more than half of all Americans do not believe that evolution is a valid scientific explanation for how the world works, but did you know that one-third of all advanced science degrees awarded in America are earned by foreign students? These…
In a few years, I am going to leave this book lying out somewhere in my house and see if one of the kids picks it up and reads it.
"The Canon" by Natalie Angier
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-24295-5 Houghton Mifflin Books
The Canon is a pop overview of some key concepts in science, starting with scientific…
One of my healthier, but alas more expensive habits, is that I walk a mile or so several times a week to my neighborhood shopping area and visit one or another bookstore. I live in a college town, so my neighborhood shopping area has some of the best bookstores anywhere. Not just a university…
There were some interesting comments here. Perhaps your post on what is a clock - the preamble to your series - may be included in the Basics series.
Time is what a clock measures. If you do not like oscillators, use radioactive decay. Observation falsifies theory, not the reverse (unless you enjoy AD 476-1054 Europe, the New Soviet Man; contemporary Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and US Homeland Severity).
Is time fundamentally quantized? Is gravitation fundamentally quantized? Probably "no" in both cases. It's more fun that way.