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THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER'Modern physics has found its poet. A captivating, fascinating, profoundly beautiful book' - John Banville'The new Stephen Hawking' - Sunday TimesThe bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics takes us on an enchanting, consoling journey to discover the meaning of time'We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future...

Rather than being an isolated, primitive body of knowledge the Jewish calendar tradition of 364 days constituted an integral part of the astronomical science of the ancient world. This tradition-attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Pseudepigrapha-stands out as a coherent, novel synthesis, representing the Jewish authors' apocalyptic worldview. The calendar is studied here both "from within"-analyzing its textual manifestations -and "from without"-via a comparison with ancient Mesopotamian...

This fascinating work begins with a scientific appraisal of time and its relationship with 3D space. It explains in clear, understandable language, the complex theories of such famous men as Newton, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. Is time infinite, or does it have a beginning and an end? Do Black Holes and White Vortices distort time, or penetrate it? The authors also analyse and evaluate puzzling, well documented reports of time travel and reincarnation, and strange cases of deja vu. Can time tr...

As the study of time has flourished in the physical and human sciences, the philosophy of time has come into its own as a lively and diverse area of academic research. Philosophers investigate not just the metaphysics of time, and our experience and representation of time, but the role of time in ethics and action, and philosophical issues in the sciences of time, especially with regard to quantum mechanics and relativity theory. This Handbook presents twenty-three specially written essays by le...

The prophet Muhammad and the early Islamic community radically redefined the concept of time that they had inherited from earlier religions' beliefs and practices. This new temporal system, based on a lunar calendar and era, was complex and required sophistication and accuracy. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, it was the Muslim astronomers of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires who were responsible for the major advances in mathematics, astronomy and astrology. This fascinating stu...

Questions of Time and Tense aims to develop and broaden a central debate in contemporary metaphysics. This debate focuses on questions about the nature of time: does time really pass? That is, do events become present and then recede into the past? Or is our ordinary conception of time, as consisting of an ever-shifting past, present, and future, merely reflective of our perspective on the world? The editor gives an introductory guide to the debate, outlining the development of rival theories. T...

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understandin...