Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps

“More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre.”—New York Times Book ReviewA dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is “part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity….In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others….Galison has unearthed fascinating material” (New York Times).
Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting…