From St Augustine’s philosophy to HG Wells’s science fiction, these are some of the best books about a subject that is both very familiar and very strange
Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language, yet we hardly understand what it is. The purer physical and mathematical aspects of time continue to be debated by the great minds of cosmology, and there are excellent books on that subject, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to Richard Muller’s more recent Now: The Physics of Time. But I’ve always been drawn to the more tangible and human questions: how do our cells tell time, and how does that telling seep upward into the neurobiology, psychology, and consciousness of our species? How is it that our smartphones and wristwatches manage to consistently agree on what time it is? And the clocks inside us, how pliable are they? Can they be made to speed up, slow down, go backward? Why does time preoccupy us, and is there anything we can do about it?
1. Confessions by St Augustine
2. The Time Machine by HG Wells
3. Time Travel by James Gleick
4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
5. Your Brain Is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano
6. A Tenth of a Second by Jimena Canales
7. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
8. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
9. The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel
10. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison
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