Samuel L. Macey - Böcker

In this encyclopedia, some 200 international scholars in 360 articles explore subjects such as physics, archeostronomy, astronomy, mathematics, time's measurements and divisions, as well as covering other scientific and interdisciplinary areas: biology, economics and political science, horology, history, medicine, geography, geology and telecommunications.

The development of increasingly precise measurements is an essential part of what Samuel L. Macey identifies as the West’s wide-ranging effort to rationalize human activity—to simplify and standardize the way we work and communicate with one another. In The Dynamics of Progress, Macey examines the history of such rationalizations as they have manifested themselves. He identifies a symbiotic relationship among these different types of rationalization, demonstrating that without the rationalizing of time, weights and measures, numbers, and language, the scientific, technological, and industrial advances of the past three hundred years would have been inconceivable.In addition to discussing rationalization in its various forms, Macey also addresses reactions against it, and closes with some observations on the future. Increasing demands for material goods have the potential for spreading wealth, but such demands strain the earth’s limited resources. How we address the challenge posed by this depletion of resources, Macey suggests, will be the ultimate test of our rationalizing powers.

Exploring the personifications of time by which Western civilization has ordered its attitudes toward both earthly existence and eternity, Patriarchs of Time traces the lineage of time’s gods from the deities of ancient Mesopotamia and Persia through the pantheons of Greece and Rome, the Christian Father Time, and the brief reign of the Newtonian Watchmaker God to the consumerist Santa Claus who holds sway over the year’s end celebrations of our own day. Each of these patriarchs, Samuel L. Macey shows, has embodied dualisms that reflect the dilemma in the Western mind between the joys and woes of our brief time on earth and the promise of eternal life or eternal punishment in the hereafter.Santa Claus is today, effectively, the sole inheritor of Saturn’s old midwinter festival, but Macey suggests that it remains to be seen whether he will fully manifest the dualism that has always characterized the West’s patriarchs of time, and whether our present consumerist saturnalia will regain the spiritual message of hope and eternal life that has always been a part of time’s dominion.

Originally published in 1991. A multidisciplinary guide in the form of a bibliography of selected time-related books and articles divided into 25 existing academic disciplines and about 100 subdisciplines which have a wide application to time studies.