快猫短视频

THE trouble with time is that there is so much of it. Since writers woke up
to this fact, book after book has appeared with histories of its past and
histrionics about its future. So how to tell the wheat from the chaff? Try
asking whether the work adds to our understanding of the meaning, measurement,
or consequences of time?

Derek York鈥檚 In Search of Lost Time(IOP, 拢7.95/$15,
ISBN 0750304758) passes this test. It contains an interesting kernel of novel
material about how we learnt to determine the ages of the oldest things on
Earth鈥攔ocks, artefacts and fossils鈥攁s well as how we became
comfortable with a world that was not just thousands but billions of years old.
This is not to be found in other popular books on time.

I enjoyed many of the book鈥檚 digressions, notably the strange story of Robert
Gentry鈥檚 claim to have discovered superheavy elements in the 1970s. I remember
the announcement by his co-worker at a hastily arranged Oxford seminar with many
famous physicists present鈥擨 suspected that, by chance, I was the only
person who happened to know about Gentry鈥檚 creationist ideas and their need for
superheavy elements. Eventually, the sky fell in on Gentry and the whole chain
of evidence that he used.

The closing chapters of the book are less successful. The author feels the
need to remind us about fashionable topics鈥攃haos, Schr枚dinger鈥檚 cat,
and the cosmological arrow of time. Really, there was no need. Readers are well
served by timelords Davies, Hawking and Penrose.

Laced as it is with nice human stories, the bittiness of the book is
frustrating. We have good evidence that brief histories of time can succeed, but
it was a mistake to conclude that briefer still was better.