Time's Pendulum
   Jo Ellen Barnett
  1998 Plenum Publishing Corp. New York USA
   ISBN: 0306457873


About the Quest to Capture Time - From Sundials to Atomic Clocks. A poetic & stimulating history of how we have measured this intangible & powerful force & yet we still cannot describe what time is.

When better than now, as a century as well as a millennium ends, to read about our quest for temporal time & how we measured it. To spelunk the deep reaches of the universe to gauge the clock of the universe, to gauge the age of the orb we squabble over each day.

What a fascinating read is Jo Ellen Barnett's Time's Pendulum. Everything I think to write about this articulate & thoughtful book echoes with double entendres: it's about time; what a timely piece or measure the seconds & minutes, & the eras will take care of themselves.

We've been measuring our days & watching through our nights since before caves. To our European lumbering years which, the Mayans thought in time cycles that seem enormous yet in their turn, seem as a pulse beat in the billions of years this blue marble has been rolling around the heavens.

I had not thought about time quite in this way - first the temporal hours when we swirl around our axis, like dervishes, in a calculable number even the Romans could handle. Then those eons we so blithely mouth about when dinosaurs “ruled” the earth for all those cycles around the sun.

I remember watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos with my children & we would go about our bedtime preparations testing what millions & billions of years felt like to our tongues & our minds.

Incomprehensible as the leaves of grass upon the prairies or the pebbles upon a shore. Jo Ellen Barnett's Time's Pendulum gives us a detailed & entertaining history of how we captured time. Its second section is on how we thought of & measured forever.

Very well done!
(05/23/99)

Rebecca