WHY TIME FLIES A MOSTLY SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION
TIME IS THE MOST COMMONLY USED NOUN IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE …
It's always on our minds and it advances through every living moment. But what is time, exactly? Do children experience it the same way adults do? Why does it seem to slow down when we’re bored and speed by as we get older? How and why does time fly?
In this witty, graceful, and intimate exploration, award-winning author and New Yorker staff writer Alan Burdick takes readers on a personal quest to understand the clocks that tick inside us all. For the better part of a decade, Burdick journeyed among scientists studying the most vexing questions about our perceptions of time. Along the way he visits the most accurate clock in the world (which exists only on paper); discovers that “now” actually happened a split second ago; finds a twenty-fifth hour in the day; lives in the Arctic to lose all sense of time; and, for one fleeting moment in a neuroscientist’s lab, even makes time go backward.
Why Time Flies is an instant classic, a vivid and deeply moving examination of our relationship with time. Make no mistake, you’ll never look at a clock the same way again.
About the Author
Alan Burdick is a senior staff editor at The New York Times and a former staff writer and senior editor at The New Yorker. His first book, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, was a National Book Awards finalist and won the Overseas Press Club award for environmental reporting.
Alan has worked as an editor at several publications, including The New York Times Magazine and Discover. His writing has appeared there and in The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Natural History, On Earth, Outside, and the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is the namesake of asteroid number 9291. He lives with his family outside of New York.
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