The Order of Time

Part I. The Crumbling of Time

4. Loss of Independence

What Happens when Nothing Happens

The word ‘time’ derives from an Indo-European root — di or dai — meaning to ‘divide’. For centuries, we have divided the days into hours. For most of those centuries, however, the hours were longer in the summer and shorter in the winter [...]

p. 56

In other words, only a few years passed between the moment at which we agreed to synchronize clocks and the moment at which Einstein realized that it was impossible to do so exactly.

p. 61

Legend has that Leibniz, whose name is still occasionally spelled with a ‘t’ (Leibnitz), had deliberately dropped the letter from his name in accordance with his belief in the nonexistence of the absolute Newtonian time t.

The Dance of the Three Giants

The route by which Einstein arrived at this conlusion [all the fields have reciprocal influences on each other, and spacetime is one of these fields] was a long one: it didn't end with the writing of the equations of the field in 1915 but continued in tortuous efforts to understand its physical significance, causing him in the process to change his ideas repeatedly. He was confused in particular regarding the existence of solutions without matter, and by whether gravitational waves were real or not. He achieves definitive clarity only in his last writings and, in particular, in the fifth appendix, ‘Relativity and the Problem of Space ’, which was added to the fifth edition of Relativity: The Special and General Theory

Part II. The World without Time

Part III. The Sources of Time