什么是时间？时间只是在我们的生活中从旁而立的吗？时间是中性的吗，还是深刻地影响着我们？ 现代社会生活中的时间概念、时间体验、时间知觉与传统社会的是一致的吗？ 生活节奏的加快到底意味着什么？ 与现代社会生活相关联或由此延伸出的一系列关键词--比如全球化、后现代、数字化浪潮、信息社会，到底意味着什么？它们与时间又有什么关系？ 我们真的可以从马克· 吐温有关忙碌的富翁和悠闲的渔夫的对话中找到生活的哲理和真谛吗？在加速的生活环境中，原地不动是否仍然意味着站在原地呢？ 办公自动化、家务劳动自动化、休闲自动化，林林总总的自动化为我们节省了大量时间，但是为什么时间匮乏却是当今最大的问题？ 飞速向前和抑郁停滞这两个相互矛盾的现象为什么在今天却如此普遍？ …… 这本书尝试探寻诸多令人不解的现象中所隐含的逻辑关系，也启发着人们对存在于时间中的人生历程进行思考。

A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps" is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others....Galison has unearthed fascinating material" ("New York Times"). Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincare, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative. Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time.