Introducing Time, Third Edition (Craig Callender)

Introducing Time is one of the Introducing series most popular selections. For an Introducing book it is also one of the most detailed, thought provoking, wide-ranging and heady science volumes around. If you want to know anything about time then Introducing Time does just that and then some more, but be prepared for lots of difficult diverse thinking. In most cases the first 100 pages will be more than enough for most people and the Introducing series could easily have made this book 200 pages long with that material alone but instead has condensed the opening philosophical thought on time into a shorter amount and goes straight into Einstein, relativity, lots on time travel and a great finish on entropy. Most of these topics are actually books in their own right such as Introducing Relativity and Introducing Einstein so Introducing Time really is good value for money. If you are thinking about starting a collection of science titles from the Introducing series then you would do... Read more

Introducing Time starts off with Aristotle's view on time then goes on to talk about many philosophical and scientific views of time. It includes Newton's absolute time, Einstein's special and general relativity as they relate to time, including Godel Universes, and also Boltzman's statistical mechanics based view of time. All in all a lot of information in such a short book.

Great book. By the time you get to the end, you'll know quite a lot about this topic and the whole theory, but you'll be pretty confused. Why confused? Because it's a hard topic to understand or interpret. And the book explains that as well as it can. But it sure will make you think.

Time is a concept that all humans have a fundamental grasp of. We all know that there is a direction to the events of our lives and that once an event happens, to the best of our knowledge it will always have happened. We break it down into units of years, days, hours, and minutes and in the last minute of some sporting events, tenths of seconds. However, when we really try to get a precise intellectual handle on it, time becomes fuzzy and it is very difficult to be precise. The passage of time is also relative to the situation; a few minutes in a dentist chair can appear to be much longer, yet a few hours with our true love can seem like minutes. In this book, Callender and Edney describe some of the attempts by scientists and philosophers to precisely define what time is. Some argue that to be logically consistent, time cannot exist. That of course seems absurd, whatever else we may know, at least locally, time does have an existence and a direction. Newton, Einstein, Godel and ot... Read more

I purchased this book because I hoped to gain a deep or profound insight about Time from educated, intellectual minds. And while I did in fact achieve this goal, it was not thru the manner that I expected. I support the entire "Introducing..." series by Totem because their illustrations along with genuine, serious educational content make the books highly appealing, attractive and inspiring. And this one was no exception -- in terms of doing its best to present, primarily chronologically, what informed minds from involved and associated fields had to say, or present as theory, about "Time." But -- and this is meant to have a dramatic impact -- BUT... it was through reading what these thinkers and scholars had to say about time that verified to me that nobody knows what it is. Which is a good thing; a great thing! To me this means that a little boy or girl living out in the middle of nowhere has just as much right -- and is equally "correct" -- in whatever they feel or suppose ... Read more