Galileo's Pendulum: From the Rhythm of Time to the Making of Matter

Newton (What Makes Nature Tick) explains the premise of his slim volume in a single sentence in the introduction:""This book is about the rhythm of time, how that rhythm was finally regulated by Galileo's pendulum, the impact the oscillations of the pendulum had on our perception of that rhythm, and how these oscillations were later found to manifest themselves in many other natural phenomena."" The book's eight chapters touch on a wealth of topics: circadian rhythms in living organisms; the conceptualization and design of calendars; the construction of clocks, from sundials and water clocks to those powered by pendula and cesium; and the development of physics from Isaac Newton to modern quantum electrodynamics. Indeed, the array is too broad for the disparate elements to come together and form a coherent whole. Additionally, the range of material here is unlikely to be fully satisfying to most readers; the basic history of science will be accessible to the nonspecialist but not compelling for the scientist science buff, while the highly technical mathematical sections will certainly cut off the general reader. Anyone wanting to understand how humans first defined time and how it became systematically measured might want to turn to the relatively recent Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, by Peter Galison. 34 photos and illus.