Alan Burdick
Forfatter af Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation
Om forfatteren
Værker af Alan Burdick
Porque o Tempo Voa - Uma investigação sobretudo cientifica (Em Portugues do Brasil) (2019) 2 eksemplarer
Satte nøgleord på
Almen Viden
- Fødselsdato
- 1965
- Køn
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Fødested
- Syracuse, New York, USA
- Bopæl
- New York, New York, USA
- Uddannelse
- Stanford University (BA, 1988)
- Erhverv
- science writer
magazine editor - Organisationer
- The New Yorker
OnEarth - Priser og hædersbevisninger
- Olive Branch Award (1992)
AAAS Westinghouse Prize (1995) - Kort biografi
- Alan Burdick is senior editor at The New Yorker and a contributing editor for OnEarth, where he writes the Synthesist column about technology and nature. He has also worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and The Sciences, and was the editorial producer and senior writer for Science Bulletins, a multimedia science-news division of the American Museum of Natural History. Alan writes for numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, OnEarth, The Week, and Natural History.
Alan’s first nonfiction book, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Overseas Press Club award for environmental reporting. His writing has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology; he also was awarded the AAAS Westinghouse prize for magazine feature-writing and was a co-recipient of the Olive Branch Award. He has been in residence several times at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y., Alan graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in the history and philosophy of science. He lives with his family outside New York.
http://www.aburdick.com/about-alan/
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Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation af Alan Burdick
Куда летит время? Весьма уместный вопрос в конце года. Если с восприятием света и звука науке все более-менее понятно – задействованы палочки и колбочки сетчатки и крошечные волоски внутри уха – то механизм отслеживания течения времени пока оставляет много вопросов. Недаром Нобелевскую премию по медицине 2017 г. дали за исследование внутренних ритмов нашего организма. Дали, увы, не французу, проведшему в пещере без света 200 дней, и показавшему на себе, к чему приводит потеря контроля за сменой суток. А самые последние открытия и эксперименты, наконец, начинают проливать свет на то, почему в разных ситуациях ход времени нам кажется разным (оно то бежит, то еле тянется) и почему чем взрослее мы, тем незаметнее проносятся годы.… (mere)
Very sparse but describes some interesting science I've not heard of. Approaches the subject from all conceivable angles which I liked but mixes it with personal stories and superfluous tangents. Wish it was more straight to the point and dear author: no one wants to read about your kids (how is that not obvious).
There are many passages of lovely writing in this book, and I kept getting tempted to quote from it. It's an extended meditation on time in history, time in the world, and time in the brain; about time as duration, time as simultaneity, and time as a collection of events. It ranges from the agreed-upon after-the-fact definition of time by which human civilization now operates to the definition of time as a consensus of rhythms in the brain. It's also about being a parent.
The book at its end descends into details of neuroscience that could have been considerably abridged; the writer says the book took longer to write than it should have, and it seems in the text itself at times as if he became immersed in its writing to the detriment of finishing it. However, it's worth taking the time to read.… (mere)
The book at its end descends into details of neuroscience that could have been considerably abridged; the writer says the book took longer to write than it should have, and it seems in the text itself at times as if he became immersed in its writing to the detriment of finishing it. However, it's worth taking the time to read.… (mere)
"I can guarantee that these pages do not answer your every last question about time", Burdick says at the end of this book. The least you can say, is that he’s honest. Burdick apparently worked on this book for a long time, and in his epilogue he compares what he's written to building a sand castle that will inexorably be swept away by the tidal wave.
And it is true that this is a rather ephemeral book. The author initially introduces us to the well-known theories about time, such as those of Saint-Augustine, that time actually just sits between our ears, is constructed by our consciousness. That mantra always returns in the following chapters. And that of course touches ground: there is no objective, exact, external time; to his - and our - astonishment, Burdick finds that even all the ultramodern scientific clocks in the world must constantly tune into each other to synchronize to a sort of average.
In the rest of the book, Burdick changes tack and embarks on a biological-psychological voyage, zooming in on how man experiences time. He delves into the classical distinction between time as an experience of the "now" (and how long is that now, or the present, precisely?), the way in which we experience time intervals or duration, and how we discern a time sequence (a chronology). For no clear reason the latter is not elaborated upon, and as an historian that disappointed me a bit.
Instead, Burdick takes an in-depth look at biological, cognitive, and neurological experiments, which often contradict each other. For example, we all have our built-in biorythm, the so-called circadian clock, which spans about a day (curiously, Burdick does not mention the menstrual cycle), but there are also all kinds of systems in our brain that coordinate sensory perceptions and connect it with the time factor (in a perpetual process of synchronizing), often in a very wonderful way and in which optical or auditory illusions can play a role. These chapters are hard to follow, but very interesting.
But there is one observation that keeps coming back: there is no separate organ in our body that observes or measures time; instead, our experience of time is a complex and still not untangled whole of neurological and cognitive processes that somehow cause us to undergo time-matching and alignment. It is only afterwards that we can say something meaningful about what happened, how long it took and whether it came before or after something else. And then it turns out that not only mechanical (or atomic) clocks, but also our brain always recalibrates and synchronizes, not only internally, but also externally (for example, empathy with other people also plays a role). And with that we are back to Augustine and his concept of time as perception.
This is generally a smooth-reading book, only halfway through you get lost in the endless but interesting experiments. It doesn't make you any wiser unless that time remains elusive not only to physicists but also to psychologists and neurologists. In other words, as elusive as for every ordinary person; but as a person, we have one absolute certainty: one day, time will end for us.… (mere)
And it is true that this is a rather ephemeral book. The author initially introduces us to the well-known theories about time, such as those of Saint-Augustine, that time actually just sits between our ears, is constructed by our consciousness. That mantra always returns in the following chapters. And that of course touches ground: there is no objective, exact, external time; to his - and our - astonishment, Burdick finds that even all the ultramodern scientific clocks in the world must constantly tune into each other to synchronize to a sort of average.
In the rest of the book, Burdick changes tack and embarks on a biological-psychological voyage, zooming in on how man experiences time. He delves into the classical distinction between time as an experience of the "now" (and how long is that now, or the present, precisely?), the way in which we experience time intervals or duration, and how we discern a time sequence (a chronology). For no clear reason the latter is not elaborated upon, and as an historian that disappointed me a bit.
Instead, Burdick takes an in-depth look at biological, cognitive, and neurological experiments, which often contradict each other. For example, we all have our built-in biorythm, the so-called circadian clock, which spans about a day (curiously, Burdick does not mention the menstrual cycle), but there are also all kinds of systems in our brain that coordinate sensory perceptions and connect it with the time factor (in a perpetual process of synchronizing), often in a very wonderful way and in which optical or auditory illusions can play a role. These chapters are hard to follow, but very interesting.
But there is one observation that keeps coming back: there is no separate organ in our body that observes or measures time; instead, our experience of time is a complex and still not untangled whole of neurological and cognitive processes that somehow cause us to undergo time-matching and alignment. It is only afterwards that we can say something meaningful about what happened, how long it took and whether it came before or after something else. And then it turns out that not only mechanical (or atomic) clocks, but also our brain always recalibrates and synchronizes, not only internally, but also externally (for example, empathy with other people also plays a role). And with that we are back to Augustine and his concept of time as perception.
This is generally a smooth-reading book, only halfway through you get lost in the endless but interesting experiments. It doesn't make you any wiser unless that time remains elusive not only to physicists but also to psychologists and neurologists. In other words, as elusive as for every ordinary person; but as a person, we have one absolute certainty: one day, time will end for us.… (mere)
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