Куда летит время? Весьма уместный вопрос в конце года. Если с восприятием света и звука науке все более-менее понятно – задействованы палочки и колбочки сетчатки и крошечные волоски внутри уха – то механизм отслеживания течения времени пока оставляет много вопросов. Недаром Нобелевскую премию по медицине 2017 г. дали за исследование внутренних ритмов нашего организма. Дали, увы, не французу, проведшему в пещере без света 200 дней, и показавшему на себе, к чему приводит потеря контроля за сменой суток. А самые последние открытия и эксперименты, наконец, начинают проливать свет на то, почему в разных ситуациях ход времени нам кажется разным (оно то бежит, то еле тянется) и почему чем взрослее мы, тем незаметнее проносятся годы.

Very sparse but describes some interesting science I've not heard of. Approaches the subject from all conceivable angles which I liked but mixes it with personal stories and superfluous tangents. Wish it was more straight to the point and dear author: no one wants to read about your kids (how is that not obvious). ( )

There are many passages of lovely writing in this book, and I kept getting tempted to quote from it. It's an extended meditation on time in history, time in the world, and time in the brain; about time as duration, time as simultaneity, and time as a collection of events. It ranges from the agreed-upon after-the-fact definition of time by which human civilization now operates to the definition of time as a consensus of rhythms in the brain. It's also about being a parent.

The book at its end descends into details of neuroscience that could have been considerably abridged; the writer says the book took longer to write than it should have, and it seems in the text itself at times as if he became immersed in its writing to the detriment of finishing it. However, it's worth taking the time to read. ( )

"I can guarantee that these pages do not answer your every last question about time", Burdick says at the end of this book. The least you can say, is that he’s honest. Burdick apparently worked on this book for a long time, and in his epilogue he compares what he's written to building a sand castle that will inexorably be swept away by the tidal wave.

And it is true that this is a rather ephemeral book. The author initially introduces us to the well-known theories about time, such as those of Saint-Augustine, that time actually just sits between our ears, is constructed by our consciousness. That mantra always returns in the following chapters. And that of course touches ground: there is no objective, exact, external time; to his - and our - astonishment, Burdick finds that even all the ultramodern scientific clocks in the world must constantly tune into each other to synchronize to a sort of average.

In the rest of the book, Burdick changes tack and embarks on a biological-psychological voyage, zooming in on how man experiences time. He delves into the classical distinction between time as an experience of the "now" (and how long is that now, or the present, precisely?), the way in which we experience time intervals or duration, and how we discern a time sequence (a chronology). For no clear reason the latter is not elaborated upon, and as an historian that disappointed me a bit.

Instead, Burdick takes an in-depth look at biological, cognitive, and neurological experiments, which often contradict each other. For example, we all have our built-in biorythm, the so-called circadian clock, which spans about a day (curiously, Burdick does not mention the menstrual cycle), but there are also all kinds of systems in our brain that coordinate sensory perceptions and connect it with the time factor (in a perpetual process of synchronizing), often in a very wonderful way and in which optical or auditory illusions can play a role. These chapters are hard to follow, but very interesting.

But there is one observation that keeps coming back: there is no separate organ in our body that observes or measures time; instead, our experience of time is a complex and still not untangled whole of neurological and cognitive processes that somehow cause us to undergo time-matching and alignment. It is only afterwards that we can say something meaningful about what happened, how long it took and whether it came before or after something else. And then it turns out that not only mechanical (or atomic) clocks, but also our brain always recalibrates and synchronizes, not only internally, but also externally (for example, empathy with other people also plays a role). And with that we are back to Augustine and his concept of time as perception.

This is generally a smooth-reading book, only halfway through you get lost in the endless but interesting experiments. It doesn't make you any wiser unless that time remains elusive not only to physicists but also to psychologists and neurologists. In other words, as elusive as for every ordinary person; but as a person, we have one absolute certainty: one day, time will end for us. ( )

As the Steve Miller Band states, Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future. One of the songs I hate the most is Chicago’s Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is? Given the nature of our existence, it seems as though it should be really easy to define time. As it turns out, this is not the case at all. It seems that Time is a subjective experience different to everyone depending on where you are and when you are asked. The author goes on to discuss Time Standards and how they are developed. Apparently, UTC is a committee-oriented idea since there is no perfect clock in existence. This is due to the very nature of Time itself. When you have a distance between two points on a Globe or in Space or where ever it is you are, the signal used to synchronize the watch or clock to a master takes time to get to the watch or clock in operation. Those clocks can also become asynchronous with other clocks of the same type. Most of the most accurate clocks seem to come from the United States since the US is in charge of GPS and other satellite systems.

Human Beings and other biological organisms possess a cluster of cells that act as a biological clock. This clock is referred to as a Circadian Rhythm. For human beings, this cluster of cells is located in a section of the brain known as the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus. Have you ever wondered why babies are terrible at sleeping through the night and have weird feeding patterns for a while? Well, that is because although the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus is developed enough, the pathways leading to the different cells of the body have not followed suit yet. A few different studies have been done on the internal clock of human beings, with the most extreme being done by a man named Michel Siffre. He lived in a cave without a calendar or clock or any access to the sun for two months. Apparently, Siffre went nuts. He lost his position in the here and now, and started to forget things that had happened. Then what does he do? He does it again, not once, but twice!

Let’s say you are a single-celled organism though, like a Cyanobacteria or something. Well, you needn’t miss out on being able to tell time, since you have a set of proteins that activate depending on daylight. Even underground creatures have a function like this, which is pretty interesting.

Anyway, this book is a mostly scientific investigation. The author, Alan Burdick, muses on a number of different things relevant to time. The way he segues into different subjects starts out with his fight against time and always being late. It is rather silly in my opinion. Though in the same note, I am usually early to everything I have to go to, so I guess it is something I don’t understand. Even with that Chicago song, I only hate it because the main focus of the song is being a jerk. Just tell him the time. You are wearing a watch, right? If it works then go and tell the time. Don’t get all Philosophical on me. Anyway, Burdick continues with his children and how they manage time as toddlers and preschoolers. He goes into how Jean Piaget discovered the means by which a child develops a sense of time.

All in all, the book is really compelling and very well done. ( )