The Clock Mirage

Our Myth of Measured Time

By: Joseph Mazur

Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright

Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

What is time? This question has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists for thousands of years.

Award-winning author and mathematician Joseph Mazur provides an engaging exploration of how the understanding of time has evolved throughout human history and offers a compelling new vision, submitting that time lives within us. Our cells, he notes, have a temporal awareness, guided by environmental cues in sync with patterns of social interaction.

Listeners learn that, as a consequence of time's personal nature, a 48-hour journey on the Space Shuttle can feel shorter than a six-hour trip on the Soyuz capsule, that the Amondawa of the Amazon do not have ages, and that time speeds up with fever and slows down when we feel in danger.

With a narrative punctuated by personal stories of time's effects on truck drivers, Olympic racers, prisoners, and clockmakers, Mazur's journey is filled with fascinating insights into how our technologies, our bodies, and our attitudes can change our perceptions. Ultimately, time reveals itself as something that rides on the rhythms of our minds. The Clock Mirage presents an innovative perspective that will force us to rethink our relationship with time, and how best to use it.

©2020 Joseph Mazur (P)2020 Tantor

Not the best of time.

I can forgive Mazur for imagining that climate change will render earth uninhabitable in 150 years, but a man who believes that shouldn't waste readers' precious time with a book as disorganized/unorganized as this one.

There are editors who do that sort of work, Joe! You should have hired one!

Could have been an article

Should have been an article, and probably in Time magazine.

Launching off from the safe harbour of a naive materialism, it never diverts from the usual course these “explorations” take, as they manipulate and abuse words like “wonder” and “mystery” to present us with…well, nothing much new about a world that we as gene machines can never truly know, before steering us right back into port with a mawkish narrative flourish involving an 11 year old granddaughter and science lessons, and tying up the ship of enquiry at dock with nary a splash on it, bearing the predictable announcement that “we are the clock”. Given that the clock is a mirage and time a mere “myth” (figment, surely?), where does this leave the granddaughter, and indeed the author?

I mean, at least he got paid for his time. Can’t say the same for us listeners.