Top 10 books about time

From St Augustine’s philosophy to HG Wells’s science fiction, these are some of the best books about a subject that is both very familiar and very strange

Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language, yet we hardly understand what it is. The purer physical and mathematical aspects of time continue to be debated by the great minds of cosmology, and there are excellent books on that subject, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to Richard Muller’s more recent Now: The Physics of Time. But I’ve always been drawn to the more tangible and human questions: how do our cells tell time, and how does that telling seep upward into the neurobiology, psychology, and consciousness of our species? How is it that our smartphones and wristwatches manage to consistently agree on what time it is? And the clocks inside us, how pliable are they? Can they be made to speed up, slow down, go backward? Why does time preoccupy us, and is there anything we can do about it?

The search for answers to these questions consumed me for several years as I wrestled them into my latest book, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation. What began as an intellectual journey morphed into something between a pastime and an obsession, accompanying me through one job and another, the birth of my children, pre-school, grade school, beach vacations, and countless cancelled dinner dates and blown deadlines. It was meant to be a book about time that I finished on time; it became a meditation on living life and not wanting time to end. Along the way, I read a great many books by other authors that dealt with time in one way or another; these are some of my favourites.

1. Confessions by St Augustine
Departing from Zeno, Aristotle, and the other early Greek philosophers who struggled to understand the physics of time, Augustine, writing in the fourth century, was the first to talk about time as an internal experience – to ask what time is by exploring how it feels to inhabit it. He noted that what we call three tenses are really just shades of one: our present experience of the past (otherwise known as memory); our present experience of the future (anticipation), and our present experience of the present (attention). “In you, my mind, I measure time,” he wrote – the credo for any modern scientist studying the perception of time.

2. The Time Machine by HG Wells
Still great after all these years! Unlike other time-travelling characters of late 19th-century literature, Wells’s hero isn’t a passive agent: he has a device with which he aims himself at the moment, past or future, of his choice. Wells was steeped in the latest scientific literature on memory, consciousness, visual perception, suggestion and illusion, and the opening chapter of this novel is effectively a short course on then-current notions of time perception. When the moment arrives to send a model of the time machine on its maiden voyage, it’s the psychologist who flicks the switch.

3. Time Travel by James Gleick
The Time Machine is just the starting point for Gleick’s joyous and engrossing survey of our species’ preoccupation with the (entirely impossible) possibility of time travel. Cyberspace, time capsules, predestination; Dr. Who, Parmenides, Nabokov – Gleick is at home in every intellectual territory. Essential reading for those wanting to understand why the present is no longer enough for us.

4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
A high-school girl and her gifted brother, aided by three otherworldly women — the Mesdames Who, Which and Whatsit – exploit a wrinkle in space-time to battle a giant disembodied brain. One of my best-loved books as a kid and now a favourite of my own children.

5. Your Brain Is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano
Buonomano, a neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles, is one of the leading scientists trying to understand how the brain tells and navigates time. Here, he takes the reader on a tour of the latest research, from the workings of our neurons to the notion of “mental time travel” – how we project ourselves into the past and future. Why does time seem to flow? Do we have one clock in us or many? It’s a fun and fascinating exploration and very accessible.

6. A Tenth of a Second by Jimena Canales
Seconds have been around since ancient Egypt as a quantifiable subunit of time. But the 10th of a second is fairly new, made accessible in the mid-19th century by advances in clock technology. Candles, a historian at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, recounts the emergence of this tiny yet vital window of time and its profound impact on the sciences, from astronomy to experimental psychology, and on society. Studies of reaction times, for instance, reveal that the speed of thought is not infinite: the impulse to lift a finger doesn’t translate instantaneously into action, and the time lag (yes, about a 10th of a second) enabled scientists for the first time to put consciousness under the proverbial microscope.

7. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
An entertaining and lush history of humankind’s efforts to visually represent time, from 1450 to the present. There’s a lavish diagram from 1862 showing the differences in time around the world – and the clear need for time zones. (Noon in Washington, DC, was 5:08 pm in London, 5:17 pm in Paris, and 6:14 pm in Vienna.) There’s the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their location; there’s even a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain. Timeless.

8. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
On 15 February 1894, a bomb exploded prematurely near the Greenwich Royal Observatory in London, killing the young French anarchist who carried it. Was it meant to destroy the observatory? Conrad thought so. The building housed a clock that defined Greenwich Mean Time, the standard time for the nation and, since 1884, the baseline for the entire world – as a symbol of industrialisation and government reach it would have been a tempting target. The evidence is circumstantial, but it was strong enough to fuel his 1907 novel, in which a porn-shop owner and secret government agent named Adolf Verloc is caught up in an anarchist terror plot.

9. The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel
An essential guide for any anxiety-prone writer, this book makes the highly useful point that, in terms of actually getting anything done on a day-to-day basis, organising one’s schedule is more important than inspiration. Zerubavel, a sociologist, has also written eloquent books on the social history and meaning of calendars and the week.

10. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison
Galison, a historian of science at Harvard, explains relativity better than any other writer out there, but this book does far more, painting a rich portrait of the technological and cultural landscape in which the science arose. With improvements in time-keeping, map-making, and communication, and the invention of time zones and railroad schedules, accurate time became a commodity to be bought, sold and distributed. How do we come to agree on what time it is right now? That question began as very practical one, Galison argues, but quickly consumed philosophy and physics – and it required Einstein and Poincaré to answer.

Why Time Flies by Alan Burdick is published by Text Publishing, priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £11.04, including free UK p&p.

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