A Tenth of a Second – A History - Hardcover

Canales, Jimena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226093182 ISBN 13: 9780226093185

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Synopsis

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn't until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, their impact on modern science and society was profound. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies - telegraphy, photography, cinematography - Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this "perceptual moment" throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction-time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Canales traces such developments and the resulting technologies and laboratory practices to provide a provocative new perspective on our device-driven existence. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, "A Tenth of a Second" sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.

About this title

Review:

"In this lucid and innovative book, Jimena Canales has crafted an extraordinary account of the broad cultural impact of new models of measurement and temporality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her exemplary transdisciplinary work will be indispensable for any historical studies of the modernization of perception and cognition."

--Jonathan Crary, Columbia University

"Canales gives a convincing argument that the changes in technology, science, and philosophy between the 19th century and the present can be understood by examining how small time intervals are understood. . . . This is an interesting, entertaining, and well-written book."

--Choice

"The book is an extraordinary example of multidisciplinary inquiry. . . . What is more, it is wonderfully composed and delightfully illustrated. . . . Canales should be congratulated for rescuing a tenth of a second from basketball arenas and racetracks; she has shown that its scholarly significance is quite simply astonishing."--Technology and Culture

--Technology and Culture

"Although time is indefinitely divisible in theory, in practice it is not, as this book illustrates beautifully. The tenth of the second is a threshold on which physiology, physics, and philosophy stumble. In refereeing the dispute between Bergson and Einstein, Jimena Canales shows the fecundity of this other dimension of time, that of the new history of science that physicists as well as philosophers tend so easily to forget."

--Bruno Latour, Institut d'études politiques de Paris

About the Author:

Jimena Canales is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0226093182
• ISBN 13: 9780226093185
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272