Peter Galison's Take on Relativity
A Review of "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps"
Peter Galison's remarkable work on science at the end of the 19th century gives an entirely new and interesting take on the motives and methods behind relativity theory.
What were the cultural factors which led Henri Poincare and Albert Einstein to each work on their respective theories of relativity? Can it be reduced to scientific factors alone, or was there more to the story?
In Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison answers this final question with a very ebulliant affirmative. The theory of relativity did not appear out of a scientific or cultural vacuum, it seems, but was rather a very valid "next step" in a worldwide attempt to understand the very nature of time and space.
Clocks and Maps
The books title itself is important, as it serves to demonstrate the two different factors which were in question toward the end of the 19th century, when the entire world was striving to find some sort of unity in the definition of time and space.
During the 1870's, 1880's and 1890's, the idea of worldwide synchronized time was something of a dream, but nowhere near reality. Because of the difficulty of synchronizing time over great distances, cities would have vastly different local times than other cities - nations would have no way of telling what time it was in any other nation at any given moment.
With the advent of train travel, it seems that this problem became ever more pronounced, as train stations would be forced to provide many clocks on their walls, displaying the local times of many other destinations.
Furthermore, this idea of time had a profound effect on the idea of distance - specifically, with the measurement of longitude on the surface of the Earth. Measuring such things as the distance across the ocean between Europe and North America proved exceedingly difficult without synchronized time, as distance measurements are directly based on perceptions of time.
The Course of the Book
Galison's very complete and thorough work takes the reader from the utter chaos of time and space, through such important moments as the laying of the first telegraph cable beneath the ocean (which paved the way for synchronicity), the various creative methods found in cities and nations for keeping everyone on the same time, and the laying of a grid work of photoelectric transmission throughout the populated world.
From the historical context, the book moves capably into the scientific theories themselves, focusing on the professional relationship between Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Poincare as they developed, a few years before Einstein, the first theory of relativity, which was designed to correlate with the current view of reality which necessitated a universe filled with "ether."
From here, the book focuses on Einstein himself - on the similarities and differences between his work and Poincare's. Where Einstein was an intelligent, young idealist in the first decade of the twentieth century, Poincare was middle-aged, with the vast majority of his impressive body of work behind him.
Most importantly, where Poincare held fast, in a way, to the classical theories of old, Einstein embraced (and indeed, invented) the new, thus revolutionizing the whole of physics in the process.
A Unified View of History
Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps successfully paints a vivid portrait of the scientific and globally political community during the time period in question, capably weaving in the advancements of science and nature in order to explain how the world evolved from a "timeless" culture (in the sense that time could not be consistently measured in a universal sense) into a "time obsessed" culture, where differences of even seconds can make all the difference in the world.
Galison's book avoids all standard clichés in explaining this view of scientific history, because it is a view which has rarely (if ever) been espoused in such detail. This same detail, however, forms the books major flaw, which is that it may be somewhat inaccessible to the casual reader, due to the utter thoroughness of the offering, which some readers may feel becomes a bit monotonous at times.
The bottom line is this: For anyone searching for an entirely original, wholly rewarding (though sometimes difficult do to an abundance of technical details) explanation of one of the greatest periods in the history of science, this book certainly fits the bill.
