Time edited by Katinka Ridderbos, Cambridge University Press, 拢25, ISBN 0521782937 Reviewed by Maggie McDonald
鈥淭IME is on my side,鈥� sang the Rolling Stones, rather a long time ago. Andrew Marvell wouldn鈥檛 have agreed. No time for agonisingly slow 鈥渧egetable鈥� love, he wrote, not with 鈥淭ime鈥檚 winged chariot hurrying near鈥� and over time, our disagreements and bewilderments about what exactly time is have grown. We cannot even agree on the course of time: linear chronology for some, synoptic perception for others. G. J. Whitrow鈥檚 magnificent Time in History laid out the wildly varying ways in which different cultures and different ages have perceived time: a perpetual present, for example, or a future that lies in the past as a cycle of eras wheeled round a grim present contrasting with a heroic golden age always just out of reach.
In that temporally significant year 2000, time preoccupied a stellar collection of lecturers at Cambridge鈥檚 Darwin College. This book records their speculations. It鈥檚 becoming a bit of a clich茅 these days to celebrate any attempt at bridge-building between the humanities and science, but this book shows how to do it elegantly and well.
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Enjoy Gillian Beer on story time and its futures, David Crystal鈥檚 meticulous dissection of the language of time, the preoccupation of modern physicists with time 鈥� see Christopher Isham and Konstantina Savvidou for this 鈥� and biologist Bambos Kyriacou on the genetics of time.