Time / Resources / Reference

Great thinking on time

Here is a growing list of books, podcasts, videos, and groups related to the class.

Bibliography

The first two books: Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” and Griffiths’ “A Sideways Look At Time” are required for the course.

Here are several other books on Time I’ve come across. I have copies of most of these, and am happy to lend them out; several are available online through NYU’s library.

I also recommend checking out the paper that started it all: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (1905). Einstein published three other papers that year, all significant, earning the year a name: Annus Mirabilis, or the Miracle Year. And the famous Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman.

More recent reads to be added here: Burkeman’s “4000 Weeks”, Loomans’ “I’ve Got Time”, “Dilla Time” by NYU’s Dan Charnas, several books on sundials. R. N. and M. W. Mayall’s excellent work on Sundials was serialized in Scientific American in the 1930s, and available through NYU Library. Time: A Very Short Introduction by Jenann Ismael is also available online.

So many other possibilities! For more inspiration see Maria Popova’s list of 7 Books on Time and her Atlantic piece on Visualizing Timelines.

Julian Barbour argues in a book and this essay that time does not exist.

Ted Chiang’s short stories often feature imagery from horology and space exploration, and his story Exhalation is specifically about the relationship between entropy and time. The Story of Your Life (the basis for arrival) is also about time.

Several non-books or online texts: This guide to the History and use of Astrolabes, by Darren Hayden. Or if you prefer, Chaucer’s. The beautiful design of Asa Smith’s Illustrated Guide to Astronomy (also via Archive.org). A visual guide to general relativity.

Video and other media

Check out these time-specific TED videos. There are physics explainers, like this short one:

As well as valuable insight into cultural aspects of time such as:

PBS’ excellent digital series, Space Time, deals with things like understanding the speed of light and causality. Start here:

Other Space Time videos include:

• The Doomsday Argument
• Do the Past and Future Exist?
• Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
• How We Know The Universe is Ancient
• Entropy Playlist (Time adjacent)

Sean Carroll is one of physics’ best popular communicators. In addition to his trade books mentioned above, he has an excellent podcast, Mindscape, as well a a regular blog.

His “Biggest Ideas in the Universe” series includes several entries on Change, Time, Spacetime, Entropy and Information

He spoke with the Long Now Foundation on “The Passage of Time & the Meaning of Life.”

What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll explains the theories of Presentism and Eternalism.

He also posts his podcasts on youtube if that’s how you get your long-form audio. Here are some excellent time-related episodes:  

• Mindscape 158 | David Wallace on The Arrow of Time
• Mindscape 89 | Lera Boroditsky on Language, Thought, Space, and Time <—- Highly recommended!
• Mindscape 140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain
• Mindscape 12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America
• Mindscape 2 | Carlo Rovelli on Quantum Mechanics, Spacetime, and Reality

Our author, Carlo Rovelli, has several talks on Youtube:

The Q&A for above is here. He also spoke with New Scientist on Time.

Briane Greene (book mentioned above) interviews Lera Boroditsky (also mentioned above, with Sean Carroll) on Language and Time.

Steve Mould on how a quartz watch works – its heart beats 32,768 times a second. This is a great video!

Imagining a Time-Literate Society — Marcia Bjornerud at Long Now (which itself has a youtube channel with great time content.)

Kurzgesagt is a thought-provoking channel with several entries on time.

• When Time Became History – The Human Era
• The Past We Can Never Return To
• A New History for Humanity 12, 017 – The Human Era
• The 12,020 Human SPACE Era Calendar
• Time: The History & Future of Everything – Remastered (Original)
• Optimistic Nihilism

Deep inside quartz clocks.

Chronogram – exploring the past.

Planned Obsolescence.

Some 99% Invisible podcast episodes deal with time:

• Waiting – How design can influence our experience of waiting.
• 10,000 years – How do we design a message that will be understood 10,000 years from now?
• Calendars – Why calendars are weird and the wild story of the attempts to promote a rational one.

Radiolab too, of course.

NPR’s series “Finding Time.“

Organizations

ITP’s own Clock Club on Github! Lot’s of code and electronics resources as well as links to inspiring projects, compiled from a few years of ad-hoc clock club meetings!

Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. Papers on subjects like the Drake Equation, the Great Filter, and the Aestivation Hypothesis. See in particular Nick Bostrom’s work, e.g. The Vulnerable World Hypothesis and The Future of Humanity.

The Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000 year clock deep inside a mountain, and hosting occasional salons to talk about it.

Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) “Time, Temporality, and Slowness” workshop organized by William Odom.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the US reference atomic clock (tune in to their WWVB broadcast with something like this) and has published this history of timekeeping. NIST (a government agency) also gave the world this animated, spoken-word video poem about time.

Reference

General

• URBAN-X Team — Bios of the founders, mentors, and industry experts running this BMW/MINI-backed accelerator for urban-tech startups.
• Lunar Month — Breaks down the five distinct astronomical lunar months — synodic, sidereal, tropical, anomalistic, and draconic — each with its own precise length.
• A Walk Through Time — An archived NIST essay, first written in 1975, tracing timekeeping from ancient calendars and sundials to atomic clocks.
• Time — Wikipedia’s sweeping overview of time as a concept, spanning philosophy, physics, and the history of its measurement.
• Second — Traces how the SI second went from a fraction of the solar day to a fraction of the year to today’s caesium-133 atomic definition.
• Reading and Writing Electronic Text — Schedule — The session-by-session syllabus for Allison Parrish’s NYU ITP course on generating text with code.
• Chronon — Explains the chronon, a hypothesized smallest indivisible “atom” of time proposed for quantum-gravity theories.
• POSIX General Concepts — Seconds Since the Epoch — The official POSIX specification defining Unix time and the exact formula for converting a calendar date into seconds since the Epoch.
• Jiffy (time) — Shows how “jiffy” became a real technical unit meaning different exact durations in electronics, computing, and physics.
• List of HTTP Header Fields — A reference table cataloging standard HTTP request and response headers with their definitions and governing RFCs.
• Fermat and Pascal on Probability — Translated 1654 letters in which Fermat and Pascal work out the “problem of points,” the correspondence that founded probability theory.
• Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy — An NYU-library-gated SpringerLink reference work surveying how ancient and indigenous cultures tracked the sky.
• Finding Our Place in the Cosmos: About This Collection — Library of Congress overview of its Carl Sagan/Ann Druyan archive paired with rare books and artifacts spanning the history of cosmology.
• North Jersey Astronomical Group — Homepage of a roughly 100-member New Jersey astronomy club running public telescope nights and stargazing events since 1981.
• Seats + Resource Booking — NYU ITP/IMA help page on reserving huddle rooms, phone booths, the podcast studio, and the documentation lab.
• How Long Is a Moment? — A pop-science rundown of nine wildly different definitions of “a moment,” from a medieval 90-second unit to Planck time and relativistic dilation.
• PrzemysĹ‚aw PaweĹ‚czak’s Publications — A TU Delft professor’s personal site listing his papers on battery-free and intermittent computing, including the widely-covered Battery-Free Game Boy project.
• CSEM Homepage — Homepage of a Swiss applied-research institute that develops microelectronics, photonics, IoT, and precision-manufacturing technology for industry partners like Swatch and ESA.
• ProQuest Ebook Central Reader (NYU) — A login-gated NYU Library e-reader link to one specific e-book on ProQuest’s platform; the page is a JavaScript app that renders no content without an active library session.
• Frame Builder Tool — An interactive online tool from a custom picture-framing company for designing and pricing a made-to-order frame.
• Ellen Nickles’ Personal Site — A personal/portfolio website for someone named Ellen Nickles, built as a JavaScript app with no server-rendered text to describe further.
• Auburn Systems Engineering Slides (NASA) — A NASA-hosted PDF slide deck covering systems-engineering fundamentals, developed in connection with Auburn University.
• NPR’s “Finding Time” Series — An NPR editorial series of articles and radio segments on how humans perceive and measure time, from COVID-warped time perception to atomic clocks and circadian rhythms.
• DuckDuckGo: “Gnomonic Projection” — A DuckDuckGo instant-answer search page giving a quick definition of the gnomonic map projection.
• Gnomonic Projection (Wikipedia) — A detailed technical article on the gnomonic map projection, the oldest known map projection, in which every great circle appears as a straight line, useful in navigation, astronomy, and crystallography.
• Meet the Constants (NIST) — NIST’s explainer on the seven fundamental physical constants, such as the speed of light and Planck’s constant, that now formally define the metric system’s base units.
• New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, Part 7 — A large plain-text excerpt (part 7 of a multi-part scan) from the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, an illustrated reference work cataloguing world mythological traditions.
• Feature Visualization Appendix: GoogLeNet 3a — An interactive appendix to Distill’s “Feature Visualization” paper, showing a gallery of computer-generated images that reveal what individual neurons in GoogLeNet’s layer 3a “see.”
• Distill — The archive of Distill, a now-dormant peer-reviewed journal known for interactive, visually rich explanations of machine learning research such as feature visualization and graph neural networks.

Standards & Reference Bodies

• Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy — A digitized 1855 astronomy textbook for U.S. public schools, fully viewable page-by-page (or downloadable as PDF/EPUB) through Internet Archive’s book reader.
• United States Naval Observatory — The Navy’s official portal for the USNO Master Clock, precise time distribution services, and astronomical data, serving as the Department of Defense’s standard of time.
• ISO 8601 Date and Time Format — ISO’s own explainer page for the ISO 8601 standard, laying out the YYYY-MM-DD format that eliminates ambiguity between international date conventions.
• NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock — NIST’s technical page on its cesium fountain atomic clocks (the retired NIST-F1 and its successors F3/F4), the instruments that realize the official U.S. definition of the second.
• Time & Frequency — NIST’s topic hub aggregating its atomic clock news, explainer articles, videos, and links to the official U.S. time service.
• Time and Frequency from A to Z — A multi-page NIST glossary defining technical time-and-frequency metrology terms, from A440 and accuracy to Allan deviation.

Course Syllabi & Materials

• Homemade Hardware — Syllabus — A 14-week ITP hardware-design course syllabus covering PCB fabrication, soldering, and Eagle software, provided as a comparison example of course organization.