Tid (kronologi), tidssystemer og standarder

From Brian Greene, one of the world's leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton's unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein's fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics' entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.

A perfect balance of science, history, and sociology, Time's Pendulum traces the important developments in humankind's epic quest to measure the hours, days, and years with accuracy, and how our concept of time has changed with each new technological breakthrough. Written in an easy-to-follow chronological format and illustrated with entertaining anecdotes, author Jo Ellen Barnett's history of timekeeping covers everything from the earliest sundials and water clocks, to the pendulum and the more recent advances of battery-powered, quartz-regulated wrist watches and the powerful radioactive "clock," which loses only a few billionths of a second per day, making it nearly ten billion times more accurate than the pendulum clock. A tour of the discoveries and the inventors who endeavored to chart and understand time, Time's Pendulum also explains how each new advance gradually transformed our perception of the world.

ASTRONOMY / GEOLOGY CATACLYSM! Cataclysm! presents a breakthrough of enormous proportions--a new understanding of cosmic events in Earth's recent geological past. Follow this multi-disciplinary, scientific study as it examines the evidence of a great global catastrophe that occurred only 11,500 years ago. Crustal shifting, the tilting of Earth's axis, mass extinctions, upthrusted mountain ranges, rising and shrinking land masses, and gigantic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes--all indicate that a fateful confrontation with a destructive cosmic visitor must have occurred. The abundant geological, biological, and climatological evidence from this dire event calls into question many geological theories and will awaken our memories to our true--and not-so-distant--past. "In not only the scholarship of paleontology but the paleontology of scholarship, this is the sort of book which someday we will realize to be--like the record of a great extinction--the marker at the end of one era and the threshold of another. It is monumental work, which no enlightened library of the coming paradigm shift will be without." --Douglas Kenyon, Atlantis Rising magazine "Allan and Delair do a brilliant job in revealing that researchers have barely touched the tip of the iceberg of events that shook the Earth around 9,577 B.C. . . . This book is an essential handbook to our ancient past: a brave multi-disciplinary approach that should be applauded." --Rand Flem-Ath, coauthor, When the Sky Fell D.S. ALLAN, a Cambridge M.A., is a science historian specializing in paleogeography, particularly in the Arctic regions. A science teacher for many years, he is a skilled cartographer and has made a special study of evidence for climatic and landform change in recent geological times. He lives in Basildon, Essex, England. J.B. DELAIR, B.Sc., is an Oxford-based geologist with wide international and commercial field experience. An anthropologist, he has a special interest in animal and plant distribution and in tribal traditions. He is the Museum Curator of Geology at University of Southampton, England.

In the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek, the renowned theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss took readers on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the Star Trek universe to see how it stacked up against the real universe. Now, responding to requests for more as well as to a number of recent exciting discoveries in physics and astronomy, Krauss takes a provocative look at how the laws of physics relate to notions from our popular culture -- not only Star Trek, but other films, shows, and popular lore -- from Independence Day to Star Wars to The X-Files. What's the difference between a flying saucer and a flying pretzel?Why didn't the aliens in Independence Day have to bother invading Earth to destroy it?What's new with warp drives?What's the most likely scenario for doomsday?Are ESP and telekinesis impossible?What do clairvoyance and time travel have in common?How might quantum mechanics ultimately affect the fate of life in the universe?