Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps - Softcover

Peter Galison was educated at Cambridge and Harvard universities. He is currently the Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of Physics at Harvard.

*Starred Review* Many have taken it as proof of Einstein's transcendent genius that he published his epoch-making Theory of Relativity while employed as a clerk in the Bern patent office, a place usually judged more likely to extinguish scientific inspiration than to kindle it. But when Harvard historian Galison takes a close look at that patent office, he sees something quite different. He sees an institution flooded with patent applications for technologies to coordinate distant clocks, applications forcefully highlighting the problem of simultaneity that lies at the very heart of relativity. Perhaps for some few it will diminish Einstein's accomplishment to realize how much his circumstances helped to focus his thinking. But for most it will only clarify his intellectual feat. Galison helps readers to understand how Einstein--no reclusive hermit--both learned from and surpassed contemporary scientists, engineers, and philosophers struggling to redefine time in a world newly unified by railroads, telegraphs, and radio. And no contemporary more closely paralleled Einstein in his pioneering path than the gifted French mathematician and cartographer Henri Poincare. An admirer of Poincare's neglected brilliance, Galison shows how the French scholar independently unraveled most of the mysteries of relativity, even partially anticipating Einstein's key breakthrough in redefining "local time." Still, while Poincare tried to integrate his insights into the Newtonian framework, Einstein recognized that relativity demanded an entirely new conceptual structure. Few books have ever made Einstein's work more accessible--or more engrossing--for general readers. Bryce Christensen
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