An enjoyable and compelling ride through one of life’s most fascinating enigmas

“What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know,” St. Augustine of Hippo lamented. “But if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

Who wouldn’t sympathize with Augustine’s dilemma? Time is at once intimately familiar and yet deeply mysterious. It is thoroughly intangible: We say it flows like a river — yet when we try to examine that flow, the river seems reduced to a mirage. No wonder philosophers, poets, and scientists have grappled with the idea of time for centuries.

The enigma of time has also captivated science journalist Dan Falk, who sets off on an intellectual journey In Search of Time. The quest takes him from the ancient observatories of stone-age Ireland and England to the atomic clocks of the U.S. Naval Observatory; from the layers of geological “deep time” in an Arizona canyon to Albert Einstein’s apartment in Switzerland. Along the way he talks to scientists and scholars from California to New York, from Toronto to Oxford. He speaks with anthropologists and historians about our deep desire to track time’s cycles; he talks to psychologists and neuroscientists about the mysteries of memory; he quizzes astronomers about the beginning and end of time. Not to mention our latest theories about time travel — and the paradoxes it seems to entail. We meet great minds from Aristotle to Kant, from Newton to Einstein — and we hear from today’s most profound thinkers: Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Julian Barbour, David Deutsch, Lee Smolin, and many more.

As usual, Dan Falk’s style combines exhaustive research with a lively, accessible, and often humorous style, making In Search of Time a delightful tour through a most curious dimension.

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“Falk’s book is what Hawking’s [A Brief History of Time] should have been.”
— Ottawa Citizen

“Falk seamlessly combines science with literary and philosophical observations … and digresses to fascinating topics like root notions of past and future, the vagaries of memory and the behavior of birds at breakfast time. Rounding out his multi-course feast, Falk contrasts Newton’s notion of ‘[a]bsolute, true, and mathematical’ time with Einstein’s final words in 1955, ‘the distinction of past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,’ to present modern speculations on black holes and the universe's future.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dan Falk is a riveting writer: his latest book is almost unputdownable. He covers an eclectic range of fascinating topics -- from prehistory to the far future. Time is a mysterious commodity: we gain, spend, save and lose it. But everyone should make enough time to read In Search of Time.”
— Martin J. Rees, author of Just Six Numbers and Our Final Hour

“[Falk] selects, organizes and interprets a mass of lore for our enlightenment and pleasure. We owe him.”
— Scientific American

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Visit Dan Falk's website.

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Preface
Introduction
 
01 HEAVENLY CLOCKWORK
Time's natural cycles
 
02 YEARS, MONTHS, DAYS
The quest for the perfect calendar
 
03 HOURS, MINUTES, SECONDS
Dissecting the day
 
04 IN TIME'S GRASP
Time and culture
 
05 THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
A bridge across time
 
06 ISAAC'S TIME
Newton, Leibniz, and the arrow of time
 
07 ALBERT'S TIME
Spacetime, relativity, and quantum theory
 
08 BACK TO THE FUTURE
The science of time travel
 
09 IN THE BEGINNING
The search for the dawn of time
 
10 BEYOND THE BIG BANG
The frontiers of physics and the origin of time's arrow
 
11 ALL THINGS MUST PASS
The ultimate fate of life, the universe, and everything
 
12 ILLUSION AND REALITY
Physics, philosophy, and the landscape of time
 
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Dan Falk has written about science for the Globe and Mail, National Post, Walrus, and New Scientist, and has been a regular contributor to the CBC Radio programs Ideas and Quirks and Quarks. He is the winner of the 2002 Canadian Science Writers’ Association Science in Society Journalism Award, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, for Universe on a T-shirt, and the 1999 American Institute of Physics’ Science Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy. He lives in Toronto.

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